Student Athlete Diary

Journal 2 - The Season Begins

Hello, my name is Jamea Waltersdorff and I am currently a student at CSM and UMUC.  While attending CSM I am participating on the women’s volleyball.  Over the next few months I will be recording a journal for the volleyball team, giving you insight on our season and sharing with you our teams experience.

Well I am sorry it has been awhile since my last journal, but I have been busy with school and volleyball.  Anyways, if you have not heard or read up on us, our record is now 14-13 overall, but our conference record is 5-1.  Since it has been awhile I am going to tell you how we did in each tournament and some of the fun we have had along the way.

AUG. 27-28 - The first tournament we went to was at Pitt, NC.  At Pitt we played extremely well the first game (Surry) and then we lost to Howard and Pitt, which was disappointing, but we were a fresh team, so in time we all knew we would get better. However, we did beat Cape Fear.  Pitt was our first time being together out of Maryland and staying together overnight.  We were all still trying to get to know each other.  Kimmie Patton decided to dye her hair, and she picked red.  It did not come out as we expected, but she was a good sport, even though she was freaking out about it all night and could not sleep, poor girl.

SEPT. 3-4 -The next tournament was at Howard Community College.  This was a really great time and we played really well.  We won our pool and played great throughout the rest of the tourney, which allowed us to advance to the championship game.  I really don’t know what to say about the championship game except we did not play to well.  We lost pretty bad and I have nothing more to say.

CONFERENCE GAMES - So it finally came, a conference game.  We played Cecil for our first conference game and did great.  We won!! Then our next conference game was Catonsville, which was also a win.  Next was Hagerstown, who is very good, and ended up beating us.  It was a good match; we just had too many unforced errors on ourselves, which helped Hagerstown win. Then it was Rockville, which was also a win, we really played well.  Next was Frederick.  We really did great against them.  We had so many kills.  Every second we cheered “Knock, Knock, whose there…. Nobody.” This is a cheer we say when we get a kill, we believe it intimidates the other team.  But Friday’s game was a lot of fun. If you want to find out the game stats and key times throughout the match, you can visit the volleyball website and find out.  Our latest match was against Essex, who we beat, and it felt pretty good.  Our next match is this Saturday against Allegheny at home at Noon.

Now the next tournament was SEPT. 9-10, the Hawks went to Butler, PA.  I would say in this tournament we did not play as well as we could have.  We played well, just not up to our potential. For some reason we just could not finish the match and would lose in the 3^rd game.  Because of our performance we ended up in the loser bracket and playing all the teams who got knocked out.  But I can say we won that losing court.

So it has been 2 months and the team has been playing a lot.  We are just getting better and better by the days.  Each match we seem to learn more and grow as a team, which is expected.  Since our team is big, we push each other more and more.  Each player on the team is so supportive of one another and the chemistry is progressing.