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!