First scrimmage

Hey everyone! Sorry it has been a while since my last blog, but the past two weeks have by far been the most exciting weeks of the pre-season/season. Last Thursday, we had our first scrimmage against Howard and I couldn't have been more nervous. I treated this scrimmage as if it were my first home game and went through the same rituals that I would normally go through during the season.

I made sure that the night before I got at least nine hours of sleep, followed by a healthy breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. I then went to my two classes of the day and took terrible notes and didn't pay much attention to the whole lecture due to my excitement. Once I was finished with school, I made my usual ham and cheese sandwich for lunch and took a one-hour nap. I then discovered that Stephen Curry, my favorite NBA rookie, has a blog as well and wrote about his first game of the season. He stated that like me, he was nervous the entire day, but once game time came he knew that he was well-prepared and his nervousness faded. Once I read this, I kept going over it in my head the rest of the afternoon, up until our scrimmage.


Sitting on the bench, watching the upperclassmen play for the first ten minutes, my palms were drenched and my mind was racing. Once it was the freshmen's turn to show what we could do, I began to relax because I knew how comfortable I felt playing with my fellow freshmen. I was very pleased with our overall performance, I thought we played very hard and didn't make too many mental mistakes. I realized how blessed I am to have such an awesome freshmen class and really enjoy playing with them, not just in the game but also in practice the first few weeks. As the scrimmage progressed, we grew less and less nervous and began to play at ease as if we were still on our high school teams. For me, the scrimmage was going well until I pulled down a rebound and landed a little hard on my knee. After this I began to limp and couldn't move quite as swiftly as I could during the first quarter. Once the scrimmage was over, I iced it and went back to my dorm where I stayed up until 1 a.m. thinking about how excited I was about the upcoming season.


I finally drifted off to sleep and woke up the following morning not able to get out of bed because my knee hurt so bad. I called my dad and we met at my phsyical therapy place where I had spent the past nine months rehabbing my knee to normal. My physical therapist, Brett Carpenter, said that I just tweaked my knee a bit and tore some scar tissue that probably needed to be torn. I was greatly relieved to hear this but then became upset at the news that I would have to sit out for at least one week. This meant that I had to miss the scrimmage the following day, plus eight or nine practices. The following day, Coach Brooks talked to me and said that we could look at this as a good thing because then I get a chance to understand the plays better and see everything through a coaches point of view. Although I have hated sitting out of practice the past week, it has amazed me at how different it is to watch practice than to actually play in it. When I was practicing, I would get frustrated because I felt like our offense seemed a little to restricted (I like to drive baseline, which causes our offense not to function properly) but after watching practice this past week, I began (like coach) to get really frustrated when someone would drive baseline or do something that the offense wasn't designed to do. By the end of the first practice I realized how much easier it would be to score almost every possession if we would just run the play! I definitely will remember that when I begin practicing and want to drive baseline. In the end I'm glad that I was able to sit out this week and observe practice, but I definitely can't wait to be practicing again this Sunday and to be able to scrimmage on Tuesday vs. Hardin Simmons. I hope everyone has a great weekend, and I will let y'all know how the scrimmage goes if you can't make it this Tuesday. Go 'Belles!

Lauren Holt