Oct. 31, 2007
Go behind the scenes of Illinois women's golf with "Chip Shots", the online golf journal. In the fifth edition of the season, junior Nancy Featherstone talks about the team's upcoming tournament, airport travel, and apartment pets.
This weekend we are headed to Austin, Texas for the last tournament to round out our fall season. Yee haw! Even though it's been a while since we've competed, we are all still pumped and feeding off of the excitement from the team and Seul Ki rocking our last tournament! To get ready for the big greens in Texas, Coach has been having us all practice our bump and run shots and lag putting. Normally, since it's almost November, I would say I am excited to get out of the east central Illinois weather and head south, but we've been pretty lucky this season with some amazing days to practice in!
Because I'm a huge nerd, my teammates give me a hard time about traveling because I still get really excited. Aside from getting to represent the school and play some great golf on beautiful courses, there are a few other perks to traveling long distances that I get really excited about. The first is it's really fun to walk in our group through the airport all dressed head to toe alike in Illini gear and see the heads turn from everyone, immediately followed by whispers. People are usually trying to guess what sport we play. Most often, people think we are cheerleaders or gymnasts, but once someone asked us if we were basketball players! They must have thought we were really good because there were only 6 of us traveling and the tallest person was only about 5'8"! The second perk of traveling is getting to eat out! It's not until your are a college student living in an apartment with the contents of your refrigerator consisting of a jar of pickles that you aren't even entirely sure are safe to eat, that you appreciate someone else preparing and serving you food! My problem is I usually eat too much and end up waddling out of the restaurant, but it's amazing!
The one thing I'm sad to leave behind this week is my two best buds, the parakeets. This will be the longest we have left them since we got them. Seul Ki and I went through the phase about a month ago of wanting a pet. We went and looked at puppies, but our apartment lease says that we "cannot have any animals of a four legged nature." So, instead we got two two-legged animals, Rocky and Bam-bam! We showed them! It started out with just my parakeet, Rocky. I brought him home and was convinced he was broken. He wouldn't do anything but sit on a perch, no chirping, no flapping his wings, he wasn't even eating! Nurse Seul Ki and I eventually diagnosed him with depression and thought that maybe if we got him a buddy that would cheer him up. Did it work? Well, now at about 6 o'clock every morning I find myself taking a deep breath, rolling out of bed, walking to our living room where the birds are and striking up deals with them to keep quiet until at least 8! They're nuts, but we love them!
Keep an eye online and watch us as we go down to Austin and try to mess with Texas this weekend!
GO ILLINI!
~Nancy
