Point Park students meet Vice President Joe Biden at Labor Day parade in Downtown Pittsburgh Tuesday, September 8, 2015
For three Point Park soccer players, strategy, positioning and patience paid off when they got a chance to meet - and get a photo with - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden at Monday's Labor Day parade in Downtown Pittsburgh.
The photo, posted on the @PointParksports Instagram and Twitter pages, shows players Audra Lewis, Justina Cincotti and Anna Goforth, posing with Biden just across from the George Rowland White Performance Center. The students and the vice president all have enormous smiles.
"We texted our coach the photo and said 'We have a new fan!'" said Goforth, a junior pre-med major from Vancouver, Wash., and a defender for the Pioneers.
Goforth gave this account of how they got the photo:
The players were returning from practice at Highmark Stadium and saw Pittsburgh's annual Labor Day parade making its way down the Boulevard of the Allies, right through the heart of Point Park's campus.
They had heard Biden was in town for the parade, so the students snared a spot on the route right outside Point Park's Boulevard Apartments. Soon, the vice president's motorcade approached.
"We thought he was going to be in a car, but when we saw he was walking and shaking hands we yelled for him to come over," Goforth recalled.
Biden headed toward them, noticed their Point Park soccer shirts and asked about the team.
"He shook all of our hands. He was really nice," Goforth said. "We asked 'Can we get a picture,' and he said 'Of course!"
Another Point Park student, sophomore dance major Angelica Luna, of Las Vegas, Nev., stepped up to take the shot, which Goforth sent to the Pioneer Athletics to post on social media. Cincotti is a sophomore global cultural studies major from East Aurora, N.Y., and Lewis is a sophomore public relations and advertising major from Liberty, Pa.
"This is so cool, that we could meet the vice president," Goforth said. "We didn't even care about waking up early for practice on a holiday."