This upcoming weekend was supposed to be one of the most important times of the year for the Massachusetts field hockey team.

Two big out-of-conference tests against Louisville and Maryland loomed on the horizon for the Minutewomen, which would go a long way toward deciding just where UMass stood among the nation’s elite.

However, the degree of what is considered important has changed for the time being, as a result of the terrorism attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center this past Tuesday.

And suddenly, it is not the Cardinals or the Terrapins that hover in the minds of the Maroon and White, but instead making sense of what has recently occurred. For Head Coach Patty Shea, the well-being of her team took precedent over two of the biggest contests of the season.

“They’re fine,” Shea said about her players. “It is one of those things that is really hard to put in perspective. With what happened, we play video games in which we do that and see movies. In some ways it desensitizes us, but we can’t let them control us. We have to keep on living.

“This touched people in different ways,” she added. “We just have to pick up the pieces and move on.”

Luckily, none of the Minutewomen’s players were from the greater New York area, but that does not mean that they weren’t affected by the recent attacks.

“Our players from New York are from western New York,” Shea said. “So, it didn’t hit us as hard as it did for other sports such as lacrosse, in which most of the team is from the greater New York area or Long Island, but we do have people with relatives there. Almost everyone is going to have a link to someone that was a victim.”

Even though both games were cancelled this weekend, it does not mean that the UMass players have failed to pick up their sticks since the incident. On the contrary, the Maroon and White were out on the practice field just a few hours after the attack, which according to Shea, was a very good thing.

“We had practice the day it happened,” the fifth-year coach said. “Because we needed to be there for each other in a different way. We needed to be with our university family.

“I think playing definitely helped,” she added. “It is something they know and it was a chance to take out some frustration in a positive way instead of in a negative way. For anger, one of the best things for us was to be there because you don’t think about it on the field. You can feel somewhat at ease.”

However, it was a different type of practice than the Minutewomen were used to, in which Shea took on a different role from the norm in an attempt to console her players.

“I needed to be a coach in a different way just like the professors needed to be teachers in a different way,” Shea said.

Her players were not the only ones whose minds were put at ease by picking up the field hockey stick. The UMass coach also benefited from getting away from the television for a while and smacking the ball around, although at that point, she was still uncertain of whether or not her team would be playing this weekend.

“At the time, the reality was that we didn’t know if we were going to compete,” Shea said. ” So it was tough to deal with [the attack] while still preparing for the possibility of competition.”

Now, of course, the team does know that the contests against Louisville and Maryland have been cancelled and will not be made up, shrinking Massachusetts’ schedule from 20 to 18 games with the loss of play.

The Minutewomen next compete on September 22 when they travel to Ann Arbor, Michigan to take on Indiana.