Jan. 11, 2008
SPRING TRAINING TRIP PHOTO GALLERY 1
In the first edition of the Illini 2008 Blog, freshman Annie McCarthy introduces herself to the Illinois tennis fans before taking readers through the first week of the year during the Illini's Spring Training Trip in Florida. Illinois opens their dual part of the schedule this weekend when it travels to Boca Raton, Fla., to take on Florida Atlantic on Saturday, Jan. 12, at 1 p.m.
Well first Illini fans, I would like to introduce myself. I am Annie McCarthy, one of the three new faces on this year's Illinois women's tennis team. I am from Beverly, Ill., and I graduated from Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School. I am one of three kids to my parents Thomas and Cynthia McCarthy, including my two brothers Tom and Patrick. I have a little bit of a line of tennis in my family, as my brother Tom played collegiate tennis at Creighton University, while my other bother Patrick is currently a student at the University of Illinois. Well, I guess that gets some of the particulars out of the way, so I will now jump right into our first trip of the new year.
It was a sunny, fairly warm Champaign day when we departed from the Atkins Tennis Center. Isn't that the way it always happens? The weather suddenly gets warm just when you leave to go on vacation somewhere warm like Boca Raton, Fla. The second we got in the van/taxi, it was like we had never left each other for Winter Break. We were laughing and cracking jokes, all in agreement that our break was so quiet without each other around. "DIBS" was the word echoing throughout the van slash taxi. The joke? Find a person (i.e. a girl with green hair) and call "DIBS" before anyone else.
When we reached the Bloomington airport, we were ready to get the adventure started. As soon as our own personal baggage was checked, we were sent to the terminal. Now mind you, Bloomington Airport is not the largest airport - I would say there is a maximum of four terminals, all with seating on either the right or left side. Everyone was sitting together on the right side, everyone that is, except Kristina. When she came up the escalator, she obviously missed us sitting on the right side and spent about three minutes looking around for us. We, on the other hand, we were all staring and waiting for her to realize. When she finally spotted us, we all started cracking up, as did many of the people in the airport who realized just what had gone down. Needless to say, she was angry!
Our first flight was to Atlanta, the ATL. The plane ride was fairly painless, except of course for our newcomer Christine, who was stuck about six rows ahead of the whole team. She was sitting between two people who apparently were not too concerned with taking up their own seats, as well as part of hers. Marisa called dibs on the guy sitting next to me, but we were later to find out that God had already called dibs, as he read the bible throughout the entire flight. When we got to the ATL, we realized we had about four hours until our next flight, so we took to playing cards - where were soon to find out two interesting facts. 1) We are EXTREMELY competitive and 2) Our coach Michelle Dasso played a mean game of Egyptian Rat Screw (even after adjusting to playing with sandwiches).
We arrived safely at the hotel, of course without Megan's luggage, which I believe brings the number of times of losing her baggage to a grand total of five. The next morning we practiced from 10:30-12:30, got a quick lunch, ran back to the hotel to change our shirts and we were back on the court by 2 p.m. for some set play. By 4 p.m., we were all pretty exhausted, but we pushed through five minutes straight of jump roping (I think I missed within the first 10 seconds ... Shhh, don't tell the coaches). That night, we did a great team bonding exercise where we all wrote a sentence or two describing what we respected about each person on the team. When we were finished, we went from freshmen to seniors reading to each other what people wrote about us. Although the exercise was serious, we seemed to be laughing the whole time.
Well, I don't want to bore you, so I will end with a quick run-through of some of the rest of today's events. We practiced again for two hours, got some lunch and practiced again for two more hours. Afterwards, we played what could perhaps be the most intense game of Ultimate Frisbee, EVER. Moral of the story, we need to be as competitive in our tennis matches as we are in Ultimate Frisbee. And yes, Michelle's team won, although Dave's team (my team) put up a valiant effort, losing it in the third-round tiebreaker.
After some quick showers, we grabbed some pizza and decided to hit up the laser tag/go-karts/arcade, and boy did we have fun! We were like little kids again, shooting each other in laser tag, passing each other on the go-karts and playing Dance Dance Revolution and other assorted games. In go-karts, Christine's car went at lightning speed, and Megan, our German, drove her first car ever! At the end of it all, we got some amazing Slurpies at 7-11 and adjourned to our current hotel party, which consists of us sitting around watching a combination of Superbad and Knocked Up (Shivani is in heaven since the only words out of her mouth all week have been quotes from these movies). Well, I better get back to the movie. I think the sound of my typing is drowning out the very small sound system that my laptop playing the DVD contains.
Thanks for reading, and until next time Illini fans,
Annie McCarthy, GO ILLINI!
