Thursday, September 17, 2009

Entry #3 - Wrapping Up The Non-League Season

This past week has been filled for the Panther volleyball team. First off, last Thursday the majority of the team met up at Jena, Lo, Maddie, and Kellye’s house to watch our guilty pleasure, Project Runway. I personally am a HUGE fan of this show and have to watch it every week.

Not only did we all watch the show together, but Jena decided to get out her nail polish and redo her nails. This turned into everyone wanting to paint their nails, which turned into Natalie and Kellye giving people makeovers. All of this taking place during the commercials of course.

Next, we had to prepare for our tough weekend tournament at home. We hosted South Dakota, Western Michigan, Marquette, and Ohio State (or as they like to say “THE Ohio State). We won our first match against South Dakota, but couldn’t finish to beat the other teams. We fought very hard over the weekend and every match was close, but we ended up 1-3 in the tournament.

So, naturally, we were excited to play NIU on Tuesday because of the tough losses of the past weekend, but we were a bit down on ourselves. Once again Natalie Chery came through.

When we got on the bus to travel to DeKalb to play NIU, Nat gave everyone on the team the lyrics to song for our team a’ capella group. Everyone kind of chuckled, but not Natalie, she told us what part we would be singing and told us that we would be practicing the song on the bus. We mastered the intro to the song and sang it loud and proud. Susie even said it sounded good.

With our spirits up, we were very ready to play Northern Illinois. When match time came, we took care of business. It took a little longer than we hoped, as we went to five with the team, but we pulled out the much needed ‘W’.

This preseason flew by, but it’s in the past and our team is ready to take over the Horizon League.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Entry #2 - On The Road In Mississippi

This past weekend our team got the opportunity to play some very tough competition at the University of Mississippi aka “Ole Miss”. We fought hard every match taking three teams (Akron, UAB, and Ole Miss) to five sets, but luck and the volleyball gods were not on our side as we went 1-3 on the weekend.

Our morale was low because of the losses and uncharacteristic start to our season, but off the court there were a lot of things in Mississippi that had us smiling.

For starters, the fact that our team got to fly on small planes that only fit nine people and were chartered especially for us was awesome. No waiting in lines at the airport, no baggage claim, and no delays - we felt like superstars.

When we arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, all us girls hopped in a 15-passenger van and drove downtown to find a place to eat. Our coaches wanted us to get the full “Southern experience” so we went to a place called Ajax. The menu had every favorite southern food you could think of from cornbread to red beans and rice (which was my favorite).

While we were eating someone had noticed that the entire ceiling of Ajax was covered in colored toothpicks. We tried to figure out how they all got up there, but the waitress finally helped us out and told us to blow through our straws and shoot our toothpicks up to the ceiling and they would stick. Everyone had to try, some people multiple times, before their toothpick stayed, but our team left our mark by adding 13+ colored toothpicks to the ceiling of Ajax.

After the first day of competition, we were a bit down on ourselves, but Natalie Chery came to the rescue to boost our spirits. Natalie is musically gifted and for some reason she thinks that the rest of our team has musical potential. Nat found an old school song by Boys II Men that she wanted us to do an a’capella version of.

She took the a’capella very seriously - everything had to perfect. Because Natalie named herself director of our a’capella group, she held tryouts in her hotel room to see who on our team had what it takes to make the song sound perfect. Everyone on the team had a different part of the song that they had to audition for that Natalie had preassigned to them. The next day at breakfast Natalie posted her results for who made our a’capella group and what part they would sing.

Almost everyone on our volleyball team made the singing group except for Mel Jansen (she was pretty upset with Natalie), and it was funny to see that the director (Nat) had got assigned to the majority of the solos. There will be more to come with our a’capella group once we record the song we auditioned for.

Our trip was rounded out by eating more soulful southern food and squeezing our team with our sweaty, smelly luggage into our 15-passenger van to drive off to the university airport. We got back onto our chartered planes and flew back to Milwaukee not looking back, but only to the future.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Entry #1 - Preseason and More

UWM sophomore Sam Trawitzke will be blogging throughout the 2009 season. Her first entry recaps the preseason.

Preseason started Monday, August 11. During preseason our team had one long practice for 4 hours, then a 45 minute break (where we religiously watched “Full House”), followed by an hour strength and conditioning.

Steve Felde was out of town the first week of preseason so Travis took over his duties. We thought that we would have it easy with Travis, but boy we were wrong. On our first day of conditioning we walked into the weight room and saw 20 pound weight vests to wear while doing our lifting regimen. All Travis had to say was, “Don’t worry ladies, this will be easy.”

After we lifted we then ran 8 ladders (suicides), which Travis assured us would be easy. Travis rounded out the first week with a cone agility drill, which proved to not only be tiring, but dangerous. While shuffling around the cones, Lauren Felsing tripped and face-planted on the gym floor. Only moments after Lauren’s accident, Mary Beth also tripped over a cone and rolled her ankle. So, all in all, Travis pushed us hard during the first week of conditioning and 12 out of the 14 of us made it through unharmed.

The first two weeks of preseason were filled with more than just volleyball and working out. We are lucky because every person on our team genuinely likes being around each other. After practice during preseason, one or two girls would have the whole team over for dinner at their house so that we could all eat and bond together. Some of the dinners we had were: soup and grilled cheese, baked potatoes, tacos and sloppy joes. But my favorite dinner was Lauren Hintze’s homemade lasagna and garlic bread. I think the rest of the team liked it too because 14 girls went through two pans like it was nothing.

Another activity we did in the first two weeks was for a charity called Empty Bowls. We went to a pottery shop and painted and glazed bowls that will be sold at the event Empty Bowls which fights against hunger in Milwaukee. It was a really fun activity that allowed our team to bond as well as help the community.

Our coach, Susie, surprised us at the end of our preseason practices by having off of conditioning for a day and by inviting us to her country club to go swimming. While half the team was relaxing alongside the pool, the other half of our team was working hard for two hours on a synchronized swimming routine. Jena, Lauren, Maddie, Morgan, Mary Beth, Anna, Natalie, and Natalie organized a perfect routine that landed them on You Tube and has an impressive 55 hits to the date.

Preseason has been a quick two and a half weeks and it excites me to see what the future will hold this season.