Startin' to Figure this Stuff Out

So, onto the basketball. All of my teammates and coaches speak English at practice, which I really appreciate. We have lifting or running every weekday morning and practice at night. Two of our teammates are still playing on the German National Team, so they won't be with us until the end of Sept., and we've been practicing with 7 or 8 players. It is a bit frustrating not being able to play 5 on 5, but we have done a lot of 3 on 3 and 4 on 4. I like my coach a lot. She is very basketball smart and likes hard workers. I am still getting used to the way things are done a bit differently. Not only is it a different philosophy, but it is hard adjusting when you played for the same coach for 4 years in a row. It is also frustrating when she corrects other players in German, because I would like to learn from what she's telling them. The rules are very similar to what I'm used to, but the 3 point line is a little farther back. One of the main things that I really like though is that our coach has us work a lot on our athleticism. Everyday we do something to work on flexibility, foot speed, agility, and/or jumping…. And we also have the endurance aspect when we do long runs with heart rate monitors and have to make sure that we are keeping a certain heart rate while we run.

Today we had practice early and in the evening we went to a banquet/party that one of our sponsers, Pharma Serve, was holding for their employees. They introduced us and even took us outside and we played 4 on 4 against some guys who were close to our age. Everyone there was excited about it, and it was a lot of fun. Afterwards we had dinner... The whole night was a Mexican theme, so they had Mexican food, and it was really good. Lori and I rode there and back with the man who is the president of our club. He is a really nice and funny older man (pictured above).

In Europe they have different levels of professional, like we have different levels of NCAA. Our club is one of 12 division 1 teams in Germany. We are all in the same conference, called the Damen Basketball Bundesligen (DBBL) and we play each team twice. Our season starts Oct. 7th and goes until March 17th. We play games almost every Saturday, and we have 2 weeks off for Christmas break. After the regular season are playoffs. During September we have preseason ("friendly") games on the weekends. Our first preseason game is this Sunday, and I'm very excited.