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.
