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This past weekend we went on our annual preseason team-bonding trip. This past Friday the coaches informed us that we were going camping for the day/night on Saturday. Needless to say some were a little more excited and willing than others at the thought of camping. I personally couldn’t wait to see how we faired in the woods, especially Jazmine Reeves and Julia Goldsworthy. Our team was split up into 3 different “pods” for the trip. Each pod was responsible for different tasks including clean up, dinner and breakfast.

We started off Saturday with a practice in the morning and headed out soon after for our trip. Once we arrived we were split up into our tents for the night that were based on position. Each tent had four or five people and we were all responsible for setting up our tent. Surprisingly every group was able to get their tent up without an issue. After setup and a quick snack time, we all went down to the river to do some canoeing and swimming. When we got back it was time for dinner, so we headed up to the barn where there was an oven and grill we could use to cook. One of the pods was in charge of making dinner that consisted of chicken quesadillas, burgers, corn, potatoes, and pasta salad.

Once we finished dinner we headed back down to the campsite for some team activities with our sports psychologist Dr. Bennett. It was also time for some s’mores and story time around the fire! This was my favorite part of the trip, hearing everyone’s embarrassing or meaningful stories from their life. It also gave the freshmen, along with everyone else, a chance to open up to each other. Once we had all calmed down from laughing so hard, we headed to our tents to attempt to sleep. We were each given a small pad and sleeping bag to sleep with. There was a series of about five different screams where people decided to scare each other. Kelly Con even crawled around the campsite in order to scare the coaches. A fake snake was planted in one of the tents and there was some continuous yelling once that was found.

We woke up the next morning around 7:45 after a not so great night of sleep. Everyone was looking a little rough as we headed back to the barn for breakfast. We had pancakes, eggs, bacon and oatmeal. Breakfast was a little trickier than dinner and it was hard to portion out the right amount of food for 35 people! You could definitely tell we hadn’t got much sleep as we would have liked, breakfast was much quieter than dinner was the previous night. It was time for us to head back down and pack up the campsite. Packing the tent back up into the bag it came from was entertaining to say the least. I think it took three of us just to get our bag zipped back up to its original form.

Even though camping and the outdoors may not be everyone’s favorite thing to do, I thought it was a good activity to bring our team closer. Our team is already extremely close, but it is especially important for the freshmen to integrate in and feel as comfortable as we all do with one another. We ended the weekend with a good practice on Sunday evening.

Yesterday we had our final team activity for preseason. This time we went to Radford at an Army base. The Army sergeants took us through six different tasks that all relied on teamwork. Most of the tasks including getting everyone across a make believe minefield or body of water. Aside from being tough physically, these tasks took a toll mentally. I think we were all pretty tired after a long day and we really looked forward to our day off on Tuesday! This week we prepare for our first regular season game against UNCW on Friday!

Xoxo,

Anne

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