Our final home game of the regular season is quickly approaching. With the last game also comes all of the senior events. Being a senior this year the planning for this weekend seems a bit surreal. This weekend includes a banquet for the seniors on Saturday night followed by the game on Sunday afternoon against Wright State. Looking back on my years at Valpo, it is hard to believe how far we have all come. Through all of the preseasons, bus rides, practices, lifts, and meetings we have all grown individually, but more importantly as a team. Rather than waiting until after the season I cannot think of a better time for this banquet than this weekend. To outsiders it may look as though the banquet is simply an opportunity for us to get dressed up in something other than the sweats and t-shirts that we seem to wear on a daily basis, and have a nice dinner recognizing the season and the senior class. However, the evening serves as a much more important event. Our team seems to spend all hours of the day together. The fact that we are able to spend countless hours together is most definitely a blessing, but can sometimes lead us to take things for granted. We are so used to relying on each other for everything from demanding the best in practice to helping with homework assignments that we sometimes lose track of exactly how fortunate we are to have been given 24 sisters at Valpo. With the regular season coming to an end and tournament time sneaking up, if there was ever a time for focus it would be now. The banquet is always filled with fun, laughter, tears, and love. I know that this evening spent together will be the perfect reminder of who we are actually playing for. We show up for practice everyday and give it everything we have for nobody else but the team. Of course we play for the university, for coach, for families, and for countless other reasons, but the simple truth is that we would not be able to play without each and every one of us. I am excited to use this weekend as an opportunity to really pull together an already tight knit team and make it into an extraordinary group of girls who are dedicated to succeeding in the upcoming tournament. Emotions will be running high throughout the weekend as we all begin to realize that our games as this particular group are getting fewer and fewer. I know that we will use these fears as motivation to really kick into gear for the rest of the way. Our regular season as the 2011 Crusaders may be wrapping up but our time as the ever growing VUWSO family will never end.
- Brooke Henderson
Hope to see you all at the game.
Brooke