Spiked

This past week­end the vol­ley­ball team had a slow start against Yale and a dif­fi­cult time main­tain­ing mo­men­tum ver­sus Brown. The Yale Bull­dogs came out with a vengeance with ab­solutely zero in­ten­tion of let­ting us dis­rupt their num­ber one stand­ings in the Ivy League. As hard as we tried there was sim­ply noth­ing to be done about their in­ten­sity … or all the creepy stuffed bull dogs they have scat­tered around their gym. For some back­ground, past Yale pres­i­dents have their old pet bull­dogs stuffed and memo­ri­al­ized once they die. Freaky.

Yale ac­tu­ally has the small­est ros­ter in the League right now, boast­ing only 10 girls. At this level, there tend to be a lot of in­juries so I have to give them props for mak­ing it through an en­tire sea­son with only 10 play­ers. For com­par­i­son, we have 14 play­ers, but on any given day we will have one to three girls out due to in­juries or class con­flicts.

After Yale, we had a short bus ride to the won­der­ful sub­urbs of Prov­i­dence, R.I., to play Brown. It was Brown’s se­nior day and their last home game of the sea­son. Say­ing they were fired up would be an un­der­state­ment. We came out strong, how­ever, and took the first game, which was some­thing we hadn’t done in a while. It felt oh so good! How­ever, our loss to Yale com­bined with Brown’s pas­sion to win ended up caus­ing us to lose the next three games and giv­ing Brown their sec­ond win of the sea­son. I’m just so glad they could end their sea­son on a high note! So since we were oblig­a­tory in their re­quest to win their last home game, I can only ex­pect the favor to be re­turned by Penn and Prince­ton this com­ing week­end. I mean it’s only fair.

The high­light of the week­end was our trip to a pet store in Con­necti­cut prior to our game at Yale. This is no Pets­Mart how­ever; this store has pens upon pens of pup­pies that you can take out and PLAY with. For a Dart­mouth stu­dent whose only in­ter­ac­tion with an­i­mals con­sists of frat dogs, this was heaven. There were bull­dogs, labs, cocker spaniels, and my fa­vorite, wiener dogs (I refuse to call them by their nor­mal name, dachs­hund).

Any­way, we have been away for the last two week­ends and it seems like an eter­nity since we have played at home in front of our amaz­ing crowd. There is truly noth­ing like play­ing in Leede Arena, es­pe­cially with the newly in­stated Stu­dent Sec­tion that has proved to be wildly suc­cess­ful in terms of at­ten­dance. We play Prince­ton on Fri­day night at 6 p.m. Last time we played the Tigers, we had just come off of a 5-game loss to Penn the night be­fore and we were tired. Need­less to say, we can only im­prove upon our last game against them, which leaves sig­nif­i­cant room for op­ti­mism. We play Penn on Sat­ur­day at 4 p.m. and it is our last home game of the sea­son as well as my last game EVER. Tear, tear.

I will of­fi­cially be en­ter­ing the world of non-ath­letes at ap­prox­i­mately 6 p.m. on Sat­ur­day evening and I hon­estly don’t know what I am going to do with my­self. Ac­tu­ally pay at­ten­tion in class? Over­rated. Get more in­volved on cam­pus? WAY too late for that. Use my com­pet­i­tive na­ture that has been honed for the last 10 years to dom­i­nate in pong? As many re­tired ath­letes have done be­fore me… yes, yes and YES. I mean it is re­ally the only vi­able op­tion. Per­haps I’ll start a ther­a­peu­tic re­tired ath­lete pong league and study the ef­fects al­co­hol has on ex-ath­letes bod­ies (I’m pretty sure they just get fat and be­come overly com­pet­i­tive). That will for sure take up all my newly made free time. Right? Or maybe The D will ask to me write an­other blog after vol­ley­ball is over! Ha…

Spiked,

Kelsey J.