Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Happy Holidays from San Antonio!!!







HAPPY HOLIDAYS to everyone!!! We are in San Antonio for the Texas Challenge and it has been AWESOME!!! This has been a great trip because we have been able to experience San Antonio; come closer as a team because of all the quality time we have spent together; and last night we won our first game of the Texas Shootout against the host team, Trinity, who was 7-1 coming into the game.

We flew down to San Antonio on Saturday. The trip included a layover in Charlotte and ironically enough, we ran into a BW alum in the airport. It seems like wherever we go we run into BW alumni. The plane trip itself was interesting as 3 of our players were on their first plane trip ever. I must say I was very impressed with how they handled their first time in the air! Arriving in San Antonio was an event in itself as our car rental company didn’t have the vans that we reserved, so we spent about 2 hours figuring out just how to get from the airport to the hotel. It was definitely a good lesson in being able to handle adversity and overcome it : )

On Sunday we had a great practice and then had the rest of the day to ourselves. Everyone went downtown and enjoyed all the sights and scenes of San Antonio. We got to see everything that the city of San Antonio had to offer: the River Walk, the Alamo, the Tower of the Americans, and the Alamo Dome. The city was definitely buzzing as the Alamo Bowl took place last night and both Missouri and Northwestern football teams and fans were here the entire time. Throw on top of that the fact that the national high school all star game is happening this week, and you can see there were a LOT of people in the city of San Antonio this week!

Monday was filled with more things to do. We had our morning shoot-around and followed that up with an alumni reception. The reception was really neat because the team got to meet a lot of BW alum that live in Texas. The great thing about that, plus meeting the alum in Charlotte, is that it is proof to the student-athletes of how far stretching the BW alumni network is, which is very important when looking for jobs when they get out of school.

The alumni ended up taking things one step further as they showed up for our game that night at Trinity. That was really neat for the team as we had our very own “Jacket Junkies” section all the way down in Texas : ) It turned out to be awesome for us as we played a VERY energized game and beat a very good team. We’re hoping that we build some good momentum from this whole experience as we head into conference play after the break. Our motto was that a new season has begun, so as far as we are concerned, we are undefeated right now : ) This trip has been awesome so far and we’re hoping to finish it off tonight with a 2-0 record in the Challenge! AWWW JACKETS!!!
Coach Strickland