April 11, 2008
In the 12th edition of the Illini 2008 Blog, freshman Annie McCarthy keeps you up to date with the road tested Illini as she recaps their trips to Big Ten foes Penn State and Michigan before finishing their road schedule this weekend against Indiana and Ohio State.
Drive to Ann Arbor, Mich. ... Drive to O'Hare ... Fly to Harrisburg, Pa. ... Fly to O'Hare ... Drive to Champaign ... All in all, I would say it was a fairly uneventful weekend -- PSYKE.
"Everyone, make sure you bring DVDs for the turtle top drive!" was the announcement made by our teammates Wednesday afternoon at practice. Once on the turtle top, situated in our seats for our six hour drive, we discovered something I learned in psychology known as the "bystander effect". My good friend Wikipedia informed me that "The bystander effect is a psychological phenomenon in which someone is less likely to intervene in an emergency situation when other people are present and able to help them when he or she is alone."
In other words, you see something bad happening, but you figure someone else will do something about it. Our Bystander effect had a little different outcome. Everyone assumed that other person would bring the DVDs and so they did not bother to bring theirs. In the end, Kristina was the only one with movies and she only brought three. While this was sufficient for one six hour trip, we knew we would not be in luck for the ride home.
After watching the completely inappropriate, but somewhat hilarious film, "Two Can Play That game," we were ready to stare at the beautiful faces of Matt Damon, Leonardo Dicaprio and Mark Whalberg in "The Departed". Wanting to save our third movie for the ride home, Megan discovered that she had a "Friends" DVD in her laptop leftover from our trip to Puerto Rico.
The next day we prepared for our match against Michigan as any Division I College athletes would, by listening to the N'Sync CD. Although we lost the doubles point, Kristina and I won our No. 3 doubles match even though we were completely nervous that the most beautiful boy we had ever seen was watching our match. After putting up a valiant fight in the singles, we ended up losing 5-2, but we were very happy with our performance.
Back in the turtle top we had viewed our last movie, "The Italian Job," and the rest of the trip we took to serenading one another. After a fairly painless airplane ride, we were slightly exhausted but ready to take down Penn State; after all, what kind of a mascot is the Nittany Lion?
Side note -- Marisa discovered that Statistics isn't the only word she can't pronounce. She has now added Nittany to her list.
After clenching the doubles point with wins at No. 2 and No. 3 doubles, we all had a good laugh at the fully dressed mascot that showed up at the match and spent a good hour straight dancing -- some of which was on Megan and Shiv's court. With only four courts to play on at Penn State, five and six singles got to watch as courts 1-3 sealed the victory.
In line for security at the airport we were shocked to find out that our good friends the Illinois Men's Gymnastics team, who had been at Penn State getting second at Big Tens, were on our flight back to Chicago. After successfully annoying everyone in the terminal around us with our energetic chatter, we got on the tiniest plane of my life, where I'd say 90% of the passengers were U of I Athletes.
Needless to say, I'm happy to be back in Champaign, and with a borrowed DVD from a gymnast, we were ready to kick back and relax.
Until Next Time,
Annie McCarthy, GO ILLINI
