OAC's!!

So a few hours after I made my last post, we lost to Muskingum which ended our winning streak :( It was definitely tough to handle since we had not felt the pain of a loss since before Christmas. However, the experience can be turned into a positive. It is easy to become complacent when you are winning all the time, and complacency is the last thing we want during the OAC Tournament!
The Tournament is exciting because after going through a rough patch in December, we have been working hard every day to get better for the post season. I am glad to say that we have definitely seen some great performances both from individuals and from the team. Since my last post, we won against our cross-town rival, John Carroll, on our home court. It was a great game, and our guard defense definitely made a difference. We traveled down to Marietta last Saturday for another “good W”, 75-43. Almost everyone on the team scored, which is awesome. (You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, Monica!) Seriously though, Monica is a perfect example of strange problem we have on this team. Sometimes people are too selfless :) We also held both John Carroll and Marietta to only 11 points in the first half.
For our first OAC Tournament game I guess we wanted a little more excitement because we beat Otterbein College 70-68. It was the closest game that we won all year, and they definitely put up a good fight. When a game is that close, every single person's contribution makes a huge difference in the outcome. Even those who did not get to play helped by being supportive and challenging us in practice! And I have a feeling that I'll never forget senior guard Jessica “Butz” Butzer’s game winning shot with 2 seconds left.
So after getting a day off to recuperate, (which was necessary for those of us who are clumsy and spent the majority of the game on the floor), we got back into the gym today to prepare for who else? That’s right, Musky. Not even two weeks ago they broke our winning streak, so we are definitely out for revenge. Now that we have the first-tournament-game jitters out of the way, we are ready to go! We play them in the Quarterfinal of the OAC tournament tomorrow at 6 at Capital University.
Besides playing in competitive, high-stakes games, another exciting aspect of tournament time is the attention and support the team receives around BW. The campus is abuzz (no pun intended) over our games. Everywhere you go professors and students are wishing you good luck and asking about the season. It’s nice to have that type of support!
Well I better go relax because it is going to be a crazy weekend down in Columbus!
Sting ‘em! Bzz!
Junior Center Ariel Brough, #45
Happy Birthday: Some of of the posts celebrating Catherine "Kitty Kat" Spisak's 19th Birthday! From left to right, freshman Kitty Kat, Me and freshmen Mariah Strayer and Katie Heinlen.
PG Love: Our two awesome senior point guards hanging out after a game, Rachael Quiring and Jessica Butzer. Senior night was last Wednesday. We took it upon ourselves to hang embarassing poster-size photos of the seniors up in the gym! Congrats on a great career SO FAR, ladies!

Secret Valentine!

So the second half of the season has gone much better than the first, and I am very proud of how much we have improved and grown as a team. Although, there is always room for more improvement, we have definitely come along way. One of our biggest successes is that we have learned to handle tough situations and we no longer fold under pressure in tight games. We found our poise in Texas, and we have learned to maintain it.
I am happy to report that we have been on a thirteen-game winning streak since I last posted right before the second Capital game. As exciting as that is, we are really focusing on getting better during every practice and every game in order to be the best team we can be going in the OAC Tournament. In addition to great play by some of our main scorers, we have had some others step up in big ways for us. Great post play was a key in our Wilmington match- up and the guards played great defense against Otterbein. A couple people came off the bench with some big plays as well! Amanda Schroeder received OAC player of the week honors for her performance against Capital, which is awesome!

We are currently tied with Capital at first in the league, so today is a big day for a number of reasons. First, we are playing second-ranked Muskingum. They are having a great season, and like all other OAC teams, cannot be taken lightly. It is also going to be televised which is always exciting. Also, even though we need to focus on our own games, there are some big OAC match-ups today that are going to affect league standings in a big way.
It’s also Valentine’s Day! Since there are only a few single ladies on our team, we decided to organize a Secret Valentine gift exchange, so everyone can enjoy their Valentine’s Day. Some of us have not received our gifts yet, but senior guard Jessica Butzer got a big, pink, stuffed wiener dog from freshman guard Monica Gustin. (How thoughtful Mon Mon.) Freshman post Katie Heinlen got some pretty sweet gifts from a one of our centers :)
Just because our second round of OAC games has gone so well does not mean that we have not come across some crazy situations along the way. I already mentioned the John Carroll changing-on-the-bus fiasco. On our way to Otterbein, we ran into terrible weather. When we were ten minutes away we were informed that the power at Otterbein was out. We were determined to play, so we decided to wait it out. It was a little nerve-wracking though. Luckily, the power came on and the game was only delayed a half an hour. Afterwards, we thought we were home free, but then the bus wouldn’t start, so we had to wait for another one to pick us up. We just hung out in Otterbein’s gym for awhile. Good thing the coaches ordered pizza or we would have been really cranky. We were pretty tired, but it wasn’t too bad. Otterbein’s Head Coach Richardson brought us some leftover cake. I was excited about that, and it was very nice of her.
So right now we just have to get ready for Musky! We already had a shoot around this morning. Before we got down to business we managed to set a school record of how many balls we could fit into one basket. I think we got 7. I had a picture of it but it didn’t get saved on my camera :( So you’ll just have to imagine our phenomenal achievement by yourself. Sorry.
Junior Center Ariel Brough, #45

(Our senior student athletic trainer Jessica Cudnik poses with her Secret Valentine gift from senior point guard Jessica Butzer. They are wearing pink for the OAC's initiative to support breast cancer awareness. For three games we wear pink warm up shirts, pre-wrap and shoe laces. Proceeds from the t-shirt sales benefit the Susan G. Komen Foundation.)

AMAZING!

With only two weeks left in the regular season, I am amazed at how far this team has come. We started the season poorly - really struggling and were 4-5 at Christmas time. At that point we "started over" and were determined to just get better every day. That focus has paid off and although we haven't always played great, we have come out on the better side of the score! We are currently 16-5. We've handled some adversity, and I know we'll handle more as we go. We have really tough games ahead of us to finish the season, but we will take them one game at a time and stay focused on making sure we are better than the day before. The improvement in our team has been amazing, and the improvement in the play of some of our players has also been amazing. It's great to see players getting better both individually as well as collectively. The leadership of our seniors has also been better and better every day and I know they can handle and lead us through whatever comes our way. Our assistant coaches have also done a fantastic job of teaching on the court, talking with players off the court, and just making my job easier. They are extremely knowledgeable about basketball, and even more importantly work great with people. I am very blessed with the people I get to share this journey with - players, coaches and staff. Now we'll see if we can get better tomorrow!!

Coach Harrer

Over Halfway Done Already?!?!

By now we are well over halfway through our season, and I can’t believe how far we’ve come. Since I last posted, we have beaten Otterbein and Marietta at home and John Carroll and Muskingum away. All four games were great team wins. The John Carroll and Marietta games were televised, which is always exciting, and perhaps a little nerve-wracking. Luckily, aside from a view embarrassing facial expressions on my part, no one did anything embarrassing. A former player, junior Paige Watson, was the color commentator for the Marietta game. She did a great job describing the team from an insider’s point of view. She also added some accurate and insightful comments. We are all very proud of her! :) It was also “Bring a Kid to the Game Day”, so we sat at a long table after the game and signed autographs for them. A couple of our male student fans even got some shirts signed, haha! I guess we are big time!
The trip to John Carroll, our cross town rival, got a little crazy. Now, when I say cross town, you would assume it would be a short trip. But you have not taken Cleveland weather into consideration. Instead, the forty minute trip took two hours. I didn’t mind, since I was able to relax and listen to my iPod longer, but Coach announced that it would be necessary for us to change on the bus. Chaos ensued as 16 sizable girls tried to change into their uniforms on a charter bus. We got some good jokes out of it, and I think it got us energized and focused on the game. Needless to say, anyone that was driving on I-480 that night got quite a show as they passed our bus. As junior forward Serena Farage pointed out, at least we’re probably not going to see any those drivers again. We literally ran into the locker room, threw on our warm-ups and ran onto the court. I’ll never forget that experience!
So today is officially the start of the second round of OAC tournament games. We play home against Capital University, who is a big rival of ours. Despite a strange bout of minor finger injuries, we have been practicing well. We are excited and ready to go. It should be a good game, and rumor is some of our guy fans are wearing body paint. We always appreciate their support and they make the games even more intense.
AWWWWWWWW JACKETS! Sting ‘em!
Junior Center Ariel Brough, #45

To the left are me and freshman forward Katie Heinlen at our Ugly Christmas Sweater Party!

To the right are freshman forward Mariah Strayer, senior guard Amanda Mondrach and freshman forward Catherine Spisak all hanging out after a game.

SCHOOL DAYS

We started back to school yesterday, after spending a good deal of the break playing basketball, eating and sleeping. The break between semesters does give us a great opportunity to get out into the community. Our team visited Kidder Elementary in Brunswick and helped out any way the teacher in that classroom wanted. We read, ran flash-card games, helped make Christmas gifts for parents, and even participated in physical education class! I think our players enjoyed it more than the elementary students. We were happy to help out, and also try to show the students that they need to study hard and set their goals high.

Mark Mabry, a B-W graduate, is the principal there. He even dug through some old yearbooks and found a picture of our own Rachael Quiring when she attended kindergarten there! The top picture is Jessica Butzer on the climbing wall in physical education class and to the right is Ariel Brough, all 6'2 of her, with a class. No, she's not standing on anything!

Posted by Coach Harrer - 1/13/09

Other pictures - to left is Amanda Schroeder helping out with flash card math games. Below is Katie

Heinlen.

Courtney Ritzler reading to a class

Catherine Spisak (left) and Mariah Strayer (right) reading with students.

Carrie Ritzler hleping students with an assignment.

San Antonio!

Well it has been about a week and a half since we left for San Antonio and started our “new season,” and what a crazy week and a half it has been! (As Coach Strickland mentioned, we went through a little bit of a performance slump, but we dealt with adversity and came back from San Antonio with two good wins.)
The trip to Texas was fun and exhausting. After practicing hard TWICE on the 26th, we set off for the airport early on the 27th. We had a few first time flyers but luckily they didn’t freak out. Travel went smoothly. There were no delays or lost luggage, and we entertained ourselves between flights by playing Bananagrams, which is a little like Scrabble. We like to play board games together, and it can get pretty competitive. (Senior guard Amanda "Mondie" Mondrach brought the game, so I posted a picture of just her with it. You can thank me later, Mondie!)
The car rental company lost our van reservation so we had to scavenge for dinner the first night in Texas. We walked a mile to the nearest Mexican restaurant, which was fine because this team will do just about anything to get some food. While waiting for our tables we made friends with some of the locals. One lady gathered our team together and blessed us, which must have worked because we played and practiced well the rest of the trip. I guess we should probably thank her! :)
The next day, after practice, Coach let us explore San Antonio. We took a boat tour (see picture) on the River Walk and shopped, of course. A group of us decided to go to dinner at Dick’s, which is a restaurant where the waiters are intentionally rude to you. We’ve all developed pretty tough skin from joking around with each other, so we had a good time, despite the insults.
Our games against Trinity and Mary Hardin-Baylor were a blast. They were the kind of games that remind you why you love basketball. The energy was crazy. Everyone, even those who didn’t see a lot of playing time, helped bring intensity. The buzzing (like yellow jackets) from the bench really helped set the tone! Haha!
Both games were a great team effort. There were a variety of contributions which led to our victories. Whether is was by scoring, getting tough offensive boards, making great steals, finishing "and-ones", or cheering, everybody helped. We had some younger players step up and senior guard Jessica (Butz) Butzer definitely sparked us. Even though we always have a team-first attitude, we were excited for those few who set great career highs.
Ultimately, the best experience of the trip was getting to celebrate two good wins with my teammates, who are also my best friends!
Needless to say, we were all pretty tired by the end of our four day “vacation.” However, that didn’t stop some energetic freshmen from running into our room, screaming, while we were dead asleep. One senior, I won’t name names, was so startled that she dove out of her bed and onto the floor. It was hilarious, but not at the time, and I never will forget it.
After getting a day off and one practice in, we played Heidelberg, another OAC team. We won 91-41, and everyone who dressed contributed on the floor, which was awesome! Again we had a bunch of career highs, and a lot of fun cheering each other on. Now we have to get ready for Otterbein tomorrow! STING 'EM! Bzz!
Junior Center Ariel Brough, #45

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

Opening Weekend in New Jersey

As the semester winds down, we are all busy with projects, papers, preparing for finals, and of course preparing for some tough upcoming games. We haven’t had a game since our opening tournament in New Jersey a little over a week ago, but we have been working very hard in practice. New Jersey, by the way, was a ton of fun!! We definitely had some quality team bonding time on the 8 hour bus drive there and back!!
Anyway, after we beat Salisbury that Saturday, Coach let us go into NYC! :)

On our drive in, we saw the Statue of Liberty from afar, but our first adventure was taking the subway into the Big Apple. Most of us have never been to New York before so it was such an amazing experience. It was overwhelming to see how many people were roaming around and crowding into the subway. The City is just so big and there’s so much going on that it was hard to focus and take it all in! It’s hard for me to even try to explain how much fun we had! Anyway, our team obviously needed food (the usual us! Surprise, surprise… :]) so we decided to eat at ESPN Zone in Times Square. While we waited to be seated, our amazing tour guide, Max (a B-W grad who teaches out in New Jersey and came to support us at our games), showed us around the streets of NY and Times Square.
We saw where the ball drops on New Years, the Empire State Building, the TRL Studio, the famous Macy’s, and every typical building in NYC. After walking around for about 45 minutes, we finally got to eat! ;] The food was amazing and we really had a good time. After dinner, we headed back to the subway under The Garden!! (Madison Square Garden, that is!) for our ride back to the hotel! Sadly, our Big Apple adventure had ended and we needed to get some quality rest for the championship game on Sunday.
We ended up losing to Kean University that Sunday, and although we wished the outcome of that game was different, we really had a fabulous time together! After such an amazing experience, it was back to work when we got back to Ohio. All of us girls have really been working hard to get better this past week of practice. Only a few more practices until our next opponent, Washington & Jefferson, and we can’t wait to compete again. The season has been so much fun thus far. All of us girls get along great which always seems to make every experience one hundred times better!! Now it’s time to get some work done before practice, Awww jackets!!!

Amanda Mondrach senior guard #25

TIME IS FLYING!

We just finished our second week of practice. In exactly two weeks from tonight we will have played our first two games. We have so much to improve before that time! Division III basketball is tough for coaches in that we don't get time to work on individual skills with our players until we start our team practice. We also feel some pressure at Baldwin-Wallace in trying to live up to our great tradition each and every year. We have 13 straight seasons of 18 or more wins and 11 of those 13 have been 20 wins or more. Our players do a great job of giving us the effort needed to meet our lofty goals each year. Of course, our players feel ready to play tomorrow and our coaching staff feels we need another month! Ready or not, here it comes!

It's Here!

Practice started yesterday. As head coach, I always feel a bit overwhelmed this time of year about all that we have to get taught before our first game. But as I tell how players...how do you eat an elephant??? One bite at a time! When there is so much to do that it you don't know what to do first, you just start biting off bits of that big ol' elephant. So that's just what we did today in practice.
I was very pleased with our progress from day 1 to day 2. Of course we have a long way to go, but the team is really focused on what we're asking them to do and they're working hard. They're fun to coach because they keep it fun, encouraging and helpful for each other, while at the same time they compete hard. We have a day off from practice tomorrow and we'll come back on Wednesday and look to keep improving.

Old friends and great tradition

This past weekend was Homecoming at B-W. It's my favorite time - spending time with our former players! They are all so successful, and it makes me proud to know they are graduates from our program. Our theme on the T-shirts this year was Tradition Never Graduates. I also love that our current players get a chance to meet some of the great players that went before them.
Of the 13 players shown, 7 of them are teaching and coaching now. Others are a Physical Therapist, Regional Sales Manager, Director of Communications with NACDA, or in graduate school. Julie Work, one of our former All-Americans, was inducted into the B-W Athletic Hall of Fame this weekend as well.

Supporting others

Our team has been working to show their school spirit through their support for their fellow athletes. Here are members of our team at a recent soccer game. The weather was great and our team always has fun just being together! AWWWW JACKETS!