Spiked

Wel­come to an­other week of Big Green Vol­ley­ball. We are in the thick of the Ivy League sea­son and things are start­ing to get in­tense. Every game is crit­i­cal to main­tain­ing a win­ning record and al­most every match in the League has been going to four or five games be­cause of the over­all com­pet­i­tive­ness of the League this year. There is cur­rently only one un­beaten team, and un­for­tu­nately it is not Dart­mouth, It’s Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity. After com­ing out vic­to­ri­ous from a thrilling five game match against Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity last Fri­day night, we suf­fered a dis­ap­point­ing loss on Sat­ur­day ver­sus Co­lum­bia Uni­ver­sity. We came out flat in the first two games, ral­lied back in the third, but ul­ti­mately fell to the Lions in the fourth game to lose the match. Co­lum­bia is a scrappy team, with an out­side hit­ter that is one of the most dy­namic play­ers I have ever played against. She raked up 26 kills against us.

Ear­lier in the sea­son, we were pissed after we suf­fered our first two losses to Uni­ver­sity of New Hamp­shire and Sa­cred Heart Uni­ver­sity. Our coach de­clared that she felt re­ally bad for the team who had to play us next. Guess what team that was? Har­vard Uni­ver­sity (we beat them twice hand­ily if you haven’t been fol­low­ing the news). Hope­fully this loss against Co­lum­bia will wake us up and allow us to come out strong and venge­ful against Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia this Fri­day night. After Penn we have Prince­ton up next, which is a HUGE game see­ing that we are num­ber one and two in the Ivy league.

So as the com­pe­ti­tion is heat­ing up and be­com­ing more in­tense, our bod­ies are start­ing to say, “Hey, you know, I don’t re­ally feel like jump­ing 100 times today. Try again to­mor­row.” So in order to cool down and help our bod­ies like us a lit­tle bit more, we ICE. (With frozen cubes of water, not Smirnoff Ice Fla­vored Vodka).

Ice is ac­tu­ally my best friend. Even with all the time I spend with my team­mates, I prob­a­bly spend even more time icing. For ex­am­ple, I had a bag of ice strapped to my shin DUR­ING rush par­ties last night; awe­some con­ver­sa­tion starter. On a daily basis I get “wtf?” looks as I walk from the gym to FoCo with an enor­mous bulge on my right shoul­der. Some­times I will sport the ac­com­pa­ny­ing ice bulge on my shins, or per­haps even my lower back if I re­ally feel like mix­ing it up a bit. My friends who do not play sports al­ways be­come ex­tremely con­cerned when I show up to any­thing with my ice plas­tered on me. On the other hand, my foot­ball play­ing friends al­ways find it hu­mor­ous to punch my ice pack and ask me if I am going out for the foot­ball team. I mean re­ally, who knew foot­ball play­ers were SO funny? And SO into using the same ma­te­r­ial over and over again?

The ice packs ap­pear in­tense, but I only use it be­cause of one sim­ple, in­evitable truth: I am OLD. My body is in re­volt of the last three years of col­lege vol­ley­ball, which has cre­ated my re­la­tion­ship with not just ice, but ibupro­fen as well. Ibupro­fen is like candy, and its strength is just putting off the in­evitabil­ity of the knee and hip re­place­ments that I will need to get when I am 50.

So there’s an­other week, an­other ice pack, an­other fight for the cham­pi­onship…

Here we come Penn and Prince­ton.

Spiked,

KJ