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Day 1, June 8, 2005
By Rachel VanMeter, University of Illinois
Greetings from Buenos Aires! Haha! Today started early for most of us, or in some cases yesterday never ended. Almost all of the girls and coaches arrived today having been on overnight flights from the states. Kevin Hambly, Brigitte Slack (from Alabama), and I were the earliest to arrive at 6:30am. With all the girls arriving throughout the mid-morning, by early afternoon, we were pretty much free to walk around the city and settle into our rooms as we pleased.
Brigitte and I decided to head up and check out our room and ended up accidentally falling asleep, even though Tim instructed us not to…WHOOPS! Fortunately we woke up in time for lunch at 1:00 where we met all the other girls and enjoyed spaghetti, grilled chicken and fruit salad. After lunch we had about 2 hours to look around the town and most of us tried to find calling cards and an internet café. Brigitte and I were walking around and asked one lady for help and she took us into a clothing store….I don’t think she understood our English! Luckily someone could help us and we found one.
Later, we met up with the team and departed for the gym at 3:30pm. The trip was about a half-hour of driving through downtown. We saw some parks and fountains and oddly enough lots of dog walkers. At the gym we began practice with some running and stretching followed by deep-court-four-on-four and then we began some defense led by Kevin and Tom. We were just trying to get familiar with our "rotation-perimeter" defense. Then we did some serving and passing with a game called "tag", where you pass two good balls and then switch with a server. We ran some hitting lines to get familiar with the setters and calls and finally we played a wash drill to try to get some scrimmaging going. It was definitely a good sweaty practice!
Finally we ate dinner at a place close to the gym. We had empanadas, hamburguesas, pizza, French fries and an awesome dessert called "pancekes". Lindsey Stalzer and I named it PGDs - pretty dang good! After dinner almost all the girls fell asleep on the bus ride back. We had a short meeting before being released to sleep and shower. We leave here tomorrow morning at 9:00 for our matches and then we will be released for the day to explore the very inexpensive city of Buenos Aires!
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