Troy University Athletics
Happy New Year!
1/1/2009 6:00:00 AM | Basketball (M)
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
HAPPY NEW YEAR, almost!
By the time I get this posted and most of you read it will be a new year-2009! It's a time for New Year's Resolutions, new ideas, newness all around.
I will spend my final hours of 2008 in the Courtyard Marriott of Bowling Green, Kentucky, with the Men's Basketball team in preparation for a basketball game at 1PM on January 1, 2009. It is the first official holiday of the Big Three (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years) that I have spent away from my family in the five years of being a full time Athletic Trainer at Troy University.
There is one Thanksgiving trip to a then very recent post-Katrina Hammond, Louisiana, that was quite interesting. If you want to know about it please feel free to ask.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones in this profession, although I'll use the term 'family' loosely. After spending as much time with these men, women, and student-athletes, they become somewhat of an extended family. And just like any other typical family, there are times when I do get tired of spending so much time with them!
We've completed a whole football season for all practical purposes and then some with 13 games in the books of the 2008-09 Basketball season. It's hard to believe, but only four of those games have been at home! That means -let me do the math- that 9 of them have been on the road. It's enough to make anybody tired of spending time with each other. The more I think about it, it really isn't that hard to believe.
So to recap my travels of 2008 (just since August, mind you)- I've been to Murfreesboro, Tennessee -two times, Columbus, Ohio, Stillwater, Oklahoma, Boca Raton, Florida, Monroe, Baton Rouge (twice), and New Orleans, Louisiana, Birmingham, Alabama, Wilmington, North Carolina, Dayton, Ohio, and now Bowling Green, Kentucky! WHEW! It makes me tired just thinking about it. It vaguely reminds me of a Willie Nelson song.
And while I'm looking at my away-wins statistics, I'm not doing so well: 4 wins out of 14! That tells me one thing: Winning on the road isn't easy! That doesn't mean you're guaranteed to win at home, but it sure does help!
The New Orleans Bowl experience for me was a quick, but exciting one. I think I was in the Big Easy less than 30 hours when it was all said and done, and spent a good deal of those sleeping in recovery from the trip from Birmingham the day before. I did make an effort to get up and run on game day, since it had been my routine during the season. I wasn't deterred by the cold rain when I left the hotel at 7AM that morning, but knew it would let up soon enough.
It did indeed let up about the time I made it to my round about destination - Cafe' du Monde! You might ask 'why the trouble of running for beignets?' If you've ever had them, you'd know the trouble. That and the fact that at that time of the morning, in the rain, there was no line in which to wait! I had beaten the crowd, another monumental achievement. An order of beignets, with powdered sugar to spare, and a hot cocoa were enjoyed while overlooking the boats on the misty morning Mississippi River. It was calories well spent to get there and in reality, the beignets were free calories since I'd run there to get them. (Yeah, right!)
I was sad we took the game into overtime, even sadder that we lost, but most sad that I had to drive back that night! It was a long day to say the very least, rolling into Troy around 7 a.m. and ending in a basketball game that night in Trojan Arena. We won that game, with minimal efforts and cheering from me. I just didn't have it in me. I am glad that the boys could do it without me though!
I have taken some pictures along the way over the last few weeks and when I figure out how to get them out of my camera, I will share them with you! Technology sure is great, but only when you can use it properly.
Conference play in basketball has begun and we are 1-1 thus far. That seems insignificant to the number of games we've played and it makes me seriously wonder why we play all those out of conference games anyway. Must be something to it, though, because everybody else is doing it too!
We are still trying to find our chemistry as a team. Any of you that have studied chemistry in school know it's a difficult subject and even more so with tremendous amounts of pressure to perform. Winning helps chemistry. That doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out! We've got 16 more games to try to figure it out...
I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and I wish you all the best for 2009! I'll be keeping my first New Year's Resolution around 8 a.m. on New Year's Day with a jog up the road for about 20 minutes or so. I just hope I don't freeze to death in the process.
Happy New Year!
Go Trojans...
Alyson
