Sail

The Packers are 1-2 and had a bye this weekend, Brewers didn’t even have a glimmering hope of getting into the playoffs and between the ASU crap call and the Badgers losing to Ohio State, I found myself starting to slip into some sort of a Wisconsin sports fanatic depression. But that didn’t last long because the Panthers went 2-0 to kick of conference play this past weekend!

The weekend started Friday night when we took on the newbies to the conference, Oakland. The fearless Grizzles came into the K ready for a challenge, but little did they know they were going to be playing against the Panthers and also the student crowd! The Milwaukee Swim and Dive team came and started a cheering section for the game, and they did a stand up job. Not only did they come in their “uniforms” but also with some sweet body paint displaying Panther prints and claw marks for some serious Panther Pride. They made a great and hilarious use out of the song Sail by AWOLNATION. All you need to know about the song is that it is pretty catchy, there are some lyrics you can’t really understand and then you hear a guy yell “SAIL”. Every time they would play the song (which was often) the cheering section would time it perfectly and scream out “sail” regardless if the song was still on or not. A huge shout out to all of you that came out and saw Myanna, Rachel, Julie and Nicole tear up the court offensively.

We sailed through Saturday as we took on Wright State, and I am happy to tell you there was never a moment when I thought a pen, book or 10-pound necklace was going to get thrown at me. We shut the Raiders out, putting up over 13 blocks allowing them to only hit a mere .047, and a huge shout-out goes to sophomore Nicole Latzig for collecting seven of those blocks!

Rachel was the queen of smashing overpasses this weekend, which brought back a painful memory for me. Rachel and I were seniors playing in a tournament, her repping Muskego and myself repping Kenosha Tremper; it didn’t end well for the Trojans let me tell you. Tremper had an overpass and Rachel, fearlessly, went to take care of it. The Trojans weren’t known for their blocking my senior year, so I’m sitting on the 10-foot line on the right side as the ball gets pounded in my face. Unfortunately my mom had the video camera rolling so the play is on record lingering somewhere in my parents basement. Nice job Rache, as for myself…hashtag embarrassing.

Susie’s metaphor this weekend was great as usual; we have been “studying” all preseason and this first week of conference it was time to take the “test.” We have been working very hard in the gym and all preseason as a result we are ready to take on the Horizon League full force. For all you Yankee fans out there, the quote this week comes from Derek Jeter on hard work, because we truly displayed hard work paying off this weekend. “There may be people that have more talent than you, but there’s no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do”

This weekend we head down to UIC and then make our way over to Valparaiso for another battle in conference play. For those of you who are making the drive down, I’ll see ya then; for the rest of you, until next time.