Tamara Sanchez-Ortiz, Class of 2016, is better known to her friends and teammates as Tamy. Despite being a Biology major, she could always be found on the field, providing strength and support to the women's football team from her position as center midfield.

####What are three words that describe what the football team means to you? Family, fun, and whatever the word is for a place to be yourself and do what you’re good at.

####How did football and the football team fit into your daily routine? Well, practice every morning at 7:00 a.m. got me out of bed, got me [to] exercise and refreshed me for my first class. When we had games at night, it was a nice way to see my soccer friends and then to come home and have dinner with them.

####How has playing football shaped or changed the way you look at life? It makes you tougher both in a mental and in a physical sense. The stamina, mental and physical, that you get from playing sport helps you when you meet challenges in your daily life. It helps you always push yourself to be the best you can be.

####What’s your favorite football memory? Just one? The last one that comes to mind is obviously the Interclassico, with all the girls in the locker room reading a letter we got from a girl who was a senior the year before, and all of us tearing up. It was a key moment.

####You've played with the men’s football team and participated in intramurals and trainings since freshman year. Has that affected your experience of the team? Do you feel that there’s an affinity between the men’s and the women’s teams, or are they divided? Being able to play on both teams definitely made me feel like the soccer team in general was just one large family and not really two split teams. It still makes sense to speak of two different teams, but I can see them coming together more often with time. For example, I saw from a distance that you had a joint soccer barbeque last year, which I think is great.

####What was your experience playing intramurals versus playing on the intercollegiate team? The difference between the two is that everyone who didn’t make it to practice would make it to intramurals. It was this fun, low-commitment environment where you only had to show up once per week. Intramurals were just a little more goofy than traditional practices, but also fun as a change because you didn’t have to run drills.

####You also played football at a high school in the U.S. How did that experience compare to your experience at NYU Abu Dhabi? The first thing that comes to mind is that for my high school, varsity and junior varsity are a lot more established, meaning there are a lot more people who know about it, and that there are try-outs, for example. [At NYUAD] we don’t do try-outs, because we could barely get enough people to play at the beginning. There’s just a different mindset: at my high school, there was a lot more emphasis on winning. It wasn’t like, we want to make sure everyone plays, which means that I spent several matches sitting on the bench the entire match. At university, the attitude was more like, we want to try to encourage students to join the team, even if they have never played before. In my freshman year, a bunch of girls who had never played before joined the team. I told them come on, it will be fun, and they went along, because for all of us it was more about the experience than it was about winning.

####Talk to me about the very beginning of the intercollegiate football teams. Well, I recently heard that the men’s team came up against some strong opponents and lost. What I think many people don’t realize is that in the beginning, they’d would often lose by eight or nine goals, and it made sense. Sometimes they played with ten people, had one substitute, or something similar. The effort was there — it just did not work out. But in the bus ride back from Zayed Sports City, where they played matches before we came to Saadiyat, their coach would praise them for their tactics and say that he could see the effort was there.

The women’s team luckily never faced that degree of competition, even though some of our rivals like Zayed University and American University of Dubai have raised the level of the league. But back in my day, we got away with winning just because the other teams were also struggling to put together teams. You have to remember that before NYUAD started the women’s league, there were no university teams! I was there for the very first games in the women’s league and you could tell that the soccer culture was just taking off in the UAE. That meant we had to start with the basics: how to take a goal kick, how to do a proper throw-in and so on. Because we were so new, we also did not have a designated goalie until my junior year. One or two people would usually be kind enough to volunteer and alternatively we would rock-paper-scissors and eenie-meenie it to pick the goalie of the day.

####Do you know when the tradition of having post-game meals started? When we got back from practices and were hungry! It was never a conscious decision, we just all went to the dining hall at the same time. We all walked back from Al Muna together, and then most people would stay back and eat together. It’s the kind of thing that just happens, but it’s the best! I hope team meals continue.

####Have you been keeping up with what’s going on with the football teams in Abu Dhabi? I heard that last year the teams started a kind of locker room tradition where players listen to a pep talk from the captains before games, which is just awesome.

####If you could add another tradition to the football teams at NYUAD, what might it be? One thing you could do is to set the team warm-ups to music. In my high school, we had a pre-game warm-up to music. You’d jog around to Eye of the Tiger and these other sweat, tears and blood songs. I think that would look great — a warmup set to music in our fancy new stadium.

####You left NYUAD a year ago. What advice do you have for the current players on the teams? Enjoy it. Sooner than you know, you’ll go abroad, and although you’ll love your time abroad, you’ll miss the team like crazy and when you come back, you will never play with exactly the same group of people. Enjoy each semester as a different experience because of the constant change of teammates.

Keep the team together. So many people worked to build the team you play on now. Follow the coaches’ philosophy about relationships over winning, but also [make sure] that [you] commit to it. You’re already spending so much time with the sport, so put your heart into it and fully enjoy the experience you’re getting.