DePaul University Athletics
Christy Landschoot: sports blog Sept. 3
9/3/2008 12:00:00 AM | WOMEN'S VOLLEYBALL
Hello everyone!
We finally had our first matches this past weekend. We played in the Chicagoland Classic on Friday and Saturday night. This tournament invites teams every year from around the Chicago area, including DePaul, Northwestern, Loyola, and UIC, to have a pre-conference tournament. This year the tournament was held at Loyola. We all could not wait to play since this was our first tournament, and we had not had the chance to play another team since Spring.
I woke up on Friday ready to play, but our match against Loyola was not until 7 PM. We met at the athletic center around noon to go over some things and pack our bags for Loyola. Usually if we have an away game in the evening, the day is used for focusing on volleyball and preparing for the match. On Friday we arrived at Loyola in the early afternoon to have a very short practice so we could familiarize ourselves with the gym. I really like doing this because it also allows us to get a few repetitions in before the match at night.
After our short practice, we went to Leona’s, an Italian restaurant close to Loyola, for our pre-game meal. After eating we went back to Loyola and watched some of the Northwestern vs. UIC match before heading to our locker room. Once we got to the locker room, we listened to music and got into our warm up uniforms. This is one of my favorite parts of the day on game days because I love getting really focused and excited for the game with the team.
Game time finally arrived at 7, and we were ready to go. We came out strong in the first game, and won by two points. We were playing fairly consistently and were terminating balls to win rallies. We went on to lose the match, however, in the fifth game by two points. The match was an exciting one, but we were all pretty bummed that we lost. Keeping our heads high and realizing that we had another chance to win, we arrived at Loyola again on Saturday to play UIC, who had lost to Northwestern in the consolation match. We were scheduled to play UIC at 4:30 PM. We started the match not playing as consistently and aggressively as the night before against Loyola. At the end of another five game match, we ended up losing to UIC. There were positive and negative points to the match which gave us and the coaches’ ideas of what we need to work on in practice.
Sunday was our off day. We all decided to go to the zoo since the weather was so nice. We walked around the zoo for a while, and it was a lot of fun! It is so bizarre that all the huge animals can be in a zoo when only a few blocks away are huge buildings and DePaul. I love all the animals, and it was such a great day to visit the zoo.
We were back in the gym for practice yesterday, and we focused on skills that we needed to improve on from the previous weekend. We head to California-Berkeley on Thursday to play in a tournament with Cal, Cal Riverside, and James Madison. This will be our first travel trip of this year, and the team is excited for it!
Have a great week! GO BLUE!
Christy
Past Blogs
July 30: Welcome to my new blog
Aug. 6: Can't Wait for Preseason
Aug. 12: Preseason has started
Aug. 19: Volleyball & Olympics
Aug. 26: Looking to our first match
