The Love/Hate Relationship

I don’t know how many of you out there listen to Dane Cook, sometimes he can be pretty vulgar, but usually after about twenty minutes of listening to him and becoming desensitized to his choice of words, I can’t help but laugh at his jokes. He tells this one joke about a couple who can’t stand one another, but stays together and has these ‘nothing fights.’ I can never remember the punch line of the joke…I think maybe it has something to do with peanut butter…but I always vividly remember how he describes the way this couple holds hands. He says their hand-holding is not loving at all, it’s like a “rigor mortis, rheumatoid arthritis, red rover grip,” and quite honestly, that description hits home for me in a really weird way.

I think it’s really difficult to articulate an athlete’s love/hate relationship with his/her respective sport. Most of the time when we think about relationships, we think about a connection between two people, and last I checked, a sport is not a person. Even so, I think that the relationship an athlete has with his/her sport can sometimes be a little more frustrating than a regular relationship. There’s really not a whole lot of give and take in an athlete/sport relationship. You can’t compromise with your sport and say, “if you buy the groceries this week, I’ll get them next week.” That would be like saying, “if I work on my dribbling today, tomorrow you have to work on my free throws.” See? It’s what I like to call untranslatable. And yet, a committed athlete spends more time improving the relationship they have with his/her sport than they probably do on any other relationship in their lives (perhaps that’s why so many NBA players get divorced…).

Sometimes I can’t help but ask myself a big fat WHY? Why am I in this relationship? Particularly, those questions of doubt about my relationship with basketball come when I’m getting screamed at for missing a shot or making a bad pass. This year has been especially interesting during those moments, because my mind goes straight to thoughts like, “I could be counseling someone who really needs my help right now,” or “I could be home spending valuable time with my family.” I can honestly say I wasn’t having those types of thoughts last year, but I digress. 

The other issue with the athlete/sport relationship is that an athlete can’t really rely on his/her sport for much. Sure, there is always the promise of getting in a workout, but there is no promise of winning a game, of getting on a hot shooting streak, or making it to the league’s championship game. All you can do is prepare, prepare, and prepare some more. When you strip it down, athletes basically spend their time preparing and dedicating their lives to something with just the hope that any one of those things might happen.

This is why I can relate to that Dane Cook joke so well. Big picture: our team isn’t doing so hot this year; we practice twice a day and have talent, but just can’t seem to put enough together to win games. Small picture: I’ve been playing basketball for fifteen years now and sometimes I will still miss a layup. It’s those times when I want to take a basketball and throw it against the backboard or drop-kick it across the court or inflict a rigor mortis, rheumatoid arthritis, red rover death grip on it.

Reading this blog back to myself, I’m sitting here thinking, “Hillary, you’re right; athletes are bat-crap crazy. Why do you do this again?”

The reality of the athlete/sport relationship delves a lot deeper than I’m giving it credit for. When I think about the happiest/most exciting moments of my life, two vivid memories pop right into my mind. One was when I was twelve and made a championship game-winning shot in a CYO tournament against a team we’d never beaten before, and the second was when the buzzer went off after the Elite Eight round of the NCAA tournament my senior year of college and I knew I was going with my team to the Final Four. I’m pretty positive that these memories will only take a backseat to future happy/exciting moments in my life such as a marriage proposal or the birth of my children.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and after this year, I’m not positive what role basketball is going to have in my life. I’m planning on finishing up my MA in counseling and taking a break from the game for a while. Because just like in normal person to person relationships, when it isn’t working anymore, sometimes the best thing to do is take a step back and give each other some space until you cross paths again in the future.

Living with Spiders

Outside of my parents’ house there is a shed where we keep our lawnmowers, pool chairs, floats, sleds, and all the other outdoor equipment/toys that we’ve accumulated over the years. As a kid, that tannish colored shed, with red shutters and flower window boxes was a regular pit-stop for me before embarking on all kinds of adventures (read: trucking my fake gas pump, chalk, and bike up to the cul-de-sac to play ‘traffic’) and activities (read: making mud pies on my Barbie kitchen set and trying to get my brother to eat them).

The shed was such an exciting place for me – I’d get all of my fabulous ideas about what to play and how to keep myself entertained by what was inside. Unfortunately, the shed had one crucial flaw: spiders. I really don’t like spiders. After I read one time that the average person swallows seven spiders a year, I was never the same (I honestly don’t even know if that’s true, and I continuously question how they gathered that data). Regardless, I am convinced now that whenever I wake up with a sore throat it’s because a spider crawled into my mouth during my sleep and thrashed and scratched all the way down my esophagus before making its way into my stomach. I’m sorry; I’m realizing that is a super gross thing to talk about. Maybe I should have prefaced this blog with some kind of ‘disturbing imagery’ warning. Anyways, back to the shed. The shed didn’t have just any kind of spiders on it, but daddy-long-legs, the creepiest of creepy spiders. Their legs are just SOOO long, and I know people say that about me, but I have a pretty normal-sized body to match my very long legs, whereas daddy-long-legs do not. They have those teeny tiny bodies and you can’t help but wonder if there is even enough space to fit a brain in there. And if not, what tells them how to function? Plain and simple, if there is a brain in there and if it is that small and relying on those long, long legs to do its bidding, well, I just don’t want any part of that.

Whenever I couldn’t get to my toys in the shed because of a parade of daddy-long-legs covering the door, I would run and get my daddy (who also has long legs incidentally) to move them for me. I always thought it was so awesome that I could just run to my dad and he’d make my fear of spiders a non-factor, removing them for me and opening those shed doors to the realm of infinite playtime possibilities…

At some point, and I’m not sure exactly when, and as we all do eventually, I stopped running to my dad to make my fears disappear. The awesome thing is that together, my mom and dad were able to give me the tools I needed in order to make a lot of my own fears disappear. When I realized for the first time that I had fears that they couldn’t take care of for me and I couldn’t take care of for myself, I learned the serenity prayer. Through the serenity prayer I started to understand that there are things I cannot change, and rather than let them stew inside me and cause all kinds of ruckus, the best thing I could do with those fears was acknowledge them, and then let them go.

When I first got to my apartment in Limoges, I was greeted by none other than a community of spiders. Since I obviously couldn’t run to my dad to have him take care of them for me, I gave myself two minutes of freak-out time, and then got a cup and a magazine putting them all outside, one by one. That is except for one. That one spider was super quick and I just could not catch her (she’s also pretty big and super scary looking), so I let her be and named her Charlotte. She lives in a hole in the wall where the pipes are in my bathroom, poking her head (and creepy legs) out from time to time. I don’t find her nearly as scary as I did that first day I came here, and in fact, her presence doesn’t even bother me anymore (except for when I wake up with a sore throat and run to the bathroom to make sure I didn’t eat her in my sleep).

I think it’s pretty incredible that sometimes there are fears that we not only overcome, but actually learn to even enjoy (unfortunately, I think that’s where my analogy of this spider fear ends). Before coming to Europe, I’d never really spent much time alone. In all honesty, I feared what I might discover if it were just me and my thoughts and lots and lots of time. At first, I didn't know what to do with myself, but after a few weeks, and then a few months, I slowly started to really enjoy the time I had alone. I’m not trying to say that there aren’t days where I miss home like hell (today was actually one of those days), but in the grand scheme of things, I’m really proud of myself for ‘Eat. Play. Love.’-ing my way to a place of serenity I didn’t know I had. 

Living with spiders isn’t so bad after all.

Basketball is a game of...

The other day I was enjoying one of my favorite activities during my down-time in between practices: thinking. Particularly on this day, I was thinking about how I made it this far as a basketball player, because let’s be honest, it isn’t my unmatched athletic and physical prowess that got me here. I like to think that I’ve made it to this level because of the way I think about the game, a mentality I started learning under my first basketball coach, really started to understand during my one year at Saint Joe’s, and continued to apply and hone in on during my time at TCNJ.

While I was home during Christmas break, a former NBA player, my agent, and I got into a discussion about what type of game basketball is. The argument laid out there was that basketball is a game of speed, and whoever is the quickest would end up winning games - the rationale being that if the defense can’t catch them, the defense can’t stop them. Since I think that players and coaches tend to over-analyze the game, and since that premise was simplistic enough to make a lot of sense in my mind, I wanted really badly to agree. I thought about that idea for a while and eventually came to the conclusion that realistically, if that were the case and basketball was a game of speed I’d be screwed out of a job. That’s when I stopped wanting to agree. Then I remembered that basketball is a team sport, and thank God for it, because that’s why I’m still working, and is also why it makes that argument null and void. Even if you are fast than your one defender, are you faster than a collective five? Most likely, chances are no, you’re not; not unless you’re Carmelita Jeter, and even then, I’m just not sure. Our conversation definitely got me thinking about what basketball was a game of, and here’s what I came up with…

Arguably, I think THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT aspects of the game of basketball are timing and spacing. Even in a basic transition set (for non basketball players, this is the time when you run really, really fast down the floor and try to score on the other team before they have time to set up their defense), if you don’t have good spacing and know where your teammates are or where they are headed, you can easily throw the ball to the bench, your own coach, the other team’s coach, or what I think is the funniest mistake you can make while executing a play, run into your own teammate (essentially doing the defense’s job for them). I actually did run into a teammate once in fifth grade, and I ran into her HARD. I vividly remember the noise she made when I knocked the wind right out of her (it sounded like a cross between a mouse’s squeak and a cat crying in a vet’s office). Honestly, I was scared out of my mind that I’d broken my best friend’s sternum and killed her…now I’m not so sure why I think this is funny…I digress.

There are probably millions of offensive sets out there, but I like to think 10-15 feet between players is a good basic rule of thumb (unless someone is setting a screen) when it comes to spacing. Those 10-15 feet give each other enough space to react to one another if someone starts driving to the basket, making a cut, setting up their defensive player to make them look like an idiot out of position when the ball gets skip-passed, and so on and so forth. Spacing is so important and, MY GOSH, when someone comes into my space and brings their defense with them, it takes just about every ounce of self restraint for me not to yell, “GO FIND YOUR OWN SPACE,” at them. Maybe I should start doing that; it would probably be pretty effective.

Of course then there’s the timing bit to this complicated puzzle we call basketball. Let’s say you’re player B. If it takes two seconds for player A to set a screen for you, player B, on the wing, and it takes four seconds for player C to set a screen for player D in the corner, and the two screens are supposed to happen simultaneously in order for player B, to have a pass/drive option, at what time should player C leave to set the screen for player D? It seems like it should be easy enough right? Player C should start two second before player A so that you, player B, and player D are coming off the screens at the same time. Unfortunately it isn’t quite that simple! A lot of timing success depends on reading how the defense is playing screens. Are they hedging? Are they switching? Are they bumping and recovering? Is it different for ball-screens than for off-the-ball screens? Then, when you finally think you know how to read exactly what the defense is doing and how much time reading the defense will take, player E beings to feel left out and starts to pinch in from the decoy position, essentially messing up all the spacing of the play. After you yell at player E to “GO FIND YOUR OWN SPACE,” and try to run the play again, player C’s shoelace becomes untied, she bends down to tie it, and once again you, player B, are throwing the ball to the bench, your coach, or the other team’s coach.

All jokes aside, I have seen teams who execute offenses perfectly using spacing and timing. Teams who work together to get one another open are my absolute favorite teams to watch (*cough cough* Stanford, Tennessee, *cough cough*). Also, to be honest, I like saying that basketball is a game of timing and spacing because somehow and someway, I became quite good at using timing and spacing to my advantage and understanding how powerful both are on the court. Timing and spacing are probably the reasons I still have a job (oh, and I guess it helps that I’m 6’3”).

Sisters, sisters; There were never such devoted sisters…

@ Rochester

Sometimes I forget that this is supposed to be a basketball blog. My bad, basketball blog readers, that’s on me. I guess I advertise this blog the same way One Tree Hill was originally advertised – that the main focus would be basketball, and what a let-down One Tree Hill turned out to be in that regard! So, to bring the blog back to focus, I’m going to talk about an aspect of the game that I really miss over here: my sister. I’ll explain.

In the 4^th quarter of the movie Love and Basketball Quincy asks Monica what was missing from the game that eventually made her want to stop playing. Spoiler alert!: Monica eventually confesses it was actually the absence of Quincy. Now, I’m not about to try to play my sister in a one-on-one game for her heart (just typing that made me giggle to myself), but I can surely understand why Monica was so happy at the end of the movie having Quincy (someone she loved) in the stands cheering her on.

@ Moravian

One of the loneliest things about being over here (other than not really speaking the language) is coming out of the locker-room after games and looking into the stands to find zero familiar faces (I guess I should really say zero familiar English-speaking faces, since I now recognize a lot of our fans). Running up to my sister, Mom, and Dad after games was one of my favorite parts of a game-day in college. They’d always tell me I played so hard and did great (regardless of how I actually felt I did). I feel like once you hit a certain level of play, when people expect a certain amount of points, rebounds, blocks, steals, or whatever from you, it’s just nice having a few people in the stands who you know will love you unconditionally regardless of whether or not you made your 3s, foul shots, or layups. Plus, now that I’m a lot of miles from home with no one to talk to after games, there’s also nobody to take such flattering pictures with like the ones you see here.

she even took a picture of the pre-game passing!

I also really miss having a non-basketball-player’s perspective after games to point out things I would never ever think about. For example, back in college, our guards and posts would split up to work on position-specific drills during warm-ups (e.g. the guards would get the hoop for a few minutes to shoot 3s and then the posts would get the hoop to work on post moves). Of course while one group was shooting the other group would be closer to half court doing some other non-shooting drill. The posts always opted to do some kind of passing. As a player I never thought anything of it, it seemed normal enough that we would pass while the guards shot, and I guess it still does, but I remember my sister telling me one time that she really thought we should practice our passing before games if we wanted to win. She was kidding (or at least I think she was), but I think that’s hilarious, and it is comments like that that I miss more than anything after a tough game.

@ Senior Night

While I was home I was lucky enough to enjoy the spectator experience with my sister at a TCNJ basketball game. After driving down four hours to Marymount University and having to pay nothing to get into the game (up top!), we relished the intensity level of the refs, what my half-time speech would be, and how I was never ever as little as how some of the players out on the court looked (which I wasn’t; I’m pretty convinced I was 5’8”, 150 lbs. out of the womb). Not to mention how we spent about three hours of our ride home working on our British accents ‘requiring’ and ‘declaring’ things only Russell Brand would truly understand. She made that road trip fun as hell and I’m so glad she went with me – actually, I don’t know how she came to so many of my college games without someone to giggle and speak British with; she must have been so bored.

She’s always there to support me, make me laugh, cheer me on, and giggle with me. I guess that’s why there really isn’t anything on this earth comparable to having a sister.

Oh Hello 2012!

After touching down in Paris at 10:15am yesterday morning, hopping on the RER metro to get to the Austerlitz train station, traveling three hours by train to arrive back in Limoges, sleeping for twelve hours, practicing this morning, watching the latest How I Met Your Mother episode, and finally getting to see this season's premier of The Bachelor, I decided I should probably put my mind to some kind of use and catch my blog followers up on my life a little bit.

Apples to Apples

I was lucky enough to spend the last two weeks at home for the holidays, seeing a ton of my friends and getting to spend quality time with my family. I got to do a few of my favorite things which I mentioned in my, "The Countdown" blog, including: catching up with friends (some who are newly engaged (yay Rach!!!)), hugging my mom, laughing until I cried with my sister, playing games with my brother, walking my dog, seeing Monster swim in his water bowl, drink Dunkin Donuts coffee, seeing TCNJ play a game, driving down to D.C. to see Chloe, et cetera, et cetera...

The aforementioned list basically sums up my two week vacation, which is why I needed to sleep for twelve hours to regain any type of strength. Even so, possibly the most enjoyable night I had over my holidays was New Year's Eve, which I really wanted to spend this blog talking about.

Since I knew that I was going to have to hop on a plane on the 1st of January, I decided to stay at home for New Year's Eve this year and spend some time with my family (minus my bro since he already had plans with his friends). My sister, Mom, Dad, and I went out to an enjoyable dinner where we discussed our desert island scenario entertainment, including which books (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), movies (Remember the Titans, Ratatouille, Moulin Rouge) , tv series (LOST, duh!), and musicals (where I came up surprisingly short in options, but went with Les Miserables & Wicked) we'd bring with us if we were stranded on a desert island. After dinner, we went home and played Apples to Apples, which was a real treat since my Dad usually isn't a game-player. If you've never played that game, you should, because it is just hilarious. Since my sister and I basically have the same sense of humor, we knew what nouns to play for each other's adjectives, but what was really interesting and entertaining

New Year's Best (we're so funny)!

was seeing what my parents found funny, disgusting, nasty, or unique. After Apples to Apples was put to bed, it was basically time to start to New Year's Eve countdown. Naturally, Annmarie and I ran upstairs to ring in 2012 in our New Year's best, aka the oldest and fanciest dresses we could find in our closets. With both of us looking glamorous in dresses we'd bought back in high school, we counted down the New Year with my parents, banged some pots and pans, and toasted 2012 with some champagne.

The evening was simple, but fun-filled and enjoyable. I was surrounded by people I love and I knew love me. With goodbyes looming over the next day, I decided that I would not have wanted to spend my last day with anyone else (another desert island scenario perhaps). It was really nice to not think about all the stressful crap that clutters our lives on any given day, and to just enjoy the moment. So, for 2012 I resolve to a) enjoy the simple, and b) live in the moment.

 Happy New Year everybody!

The Countdown…

Tree w/ cathedral in the background

 Every year ABC Family does a ‘25 days of Christmas’ event. As you all know, I’m not home and I don’t get ABC Family in France, so I am not watching their 25 days of Christmas specials. Even so, I am doing Christmas-y things. I know some people hate how quickly Christmas songs pop up on the radio post-Thanksgiving feast, but this year I was really looking forward to hearing those classic Christmas carols (I might have even had my ‘A Christmas Carol’ cd playing while I was preparing my French Thanksgiving). Hearing those Christmas songs, starting my Advent calendar, and buying Christmas presents makes me feel like I am reeling Christmas in, pulling it closer to me, and therefore getting one step closer to seeing the people I love and getting to do some of the things I really miss back home.

Santa! I know him!

Although I haven’t been watching ABC Family’s ’25 days of Christmas,’ I have been watching a lot of my favorite Christmas movies. I started off with my favorite Christmas movie of all time, Elf, which surprisingly made me tear up a little at the end. The next night I watched Love Actually, which brought on a full-blown sobbing (particularly the scene where Mark held up the sign to Keira Knightley that says, “To me, you are perfect”). Although the bursts of tears were a little unusual, I figured I was just excited about getting in the holiday spirit (and honestly, who doesn’t cry at that part in Love Actually?). So I wasn’t too concerned that I was openly weeping at my Christmas movies, that is, until I continued to cry at A Charlie Brown Christmas, this week’s How I Met Your Mother, and Modern Family’s ‘Express Christmas’ episode. All the crying really made me stop and think about what is going on with me that would cause me to get so emotional over some of these not so incredibly emotional movies and television shows. Then it hit me.

Since I’m not living at home, or close to home, or in the same continent as home, Christmas means something different to me now than perhaps it used to. It’s no secret that living alone in a foreign country is difficult, and I’ve had some trying moments this year, so I’m really looking forward to spending Christmas at home. Therefore, this year, Christmas means the following for me:

Me w/ some Christmas lights

Getting some really long hugs from my mom.

Hearing my dad sing his unique versions of songs.

Finding not funny things funny with my sister and actually being able to laugh together (as opposed to the usual LOLs sent through bbm).

Playing a board game and talking with my bro.

Having Christmas dinner with my regular (and honorary) family members.

Seeing all the cats, but especially my Little (now big) Monster.

Walking my sister’s Evil Assistant (aka, Muppet, our dog).

Catching up with old friends and seeing how they’re doing over dinner, coffee, hot cocoa, or wine.

Seeing the TCNJ Lions play some basketball.

Watching an old teammate coach.

-and finally-

Being able to speak, and more importantly, listen to English.

In the past, Christmas’ arrival meant finishing up finals, scrambling to find people presents, and sitting in traffic. Since I have no finals, have bought almost all of my presents, and can take my time getting places over here, Christmas' arrival is a pretty enjoyable time. So, will I continue to torture myself with sappy Christmas movies until my flight leaves on the 19^th? Most likely, even if it’s for no reason other than to remind me that Christmas is just around the corner.

A French Thanksgiving

Joyce, Me, & the Turkey

I think any of my fellow American overseas basketball players would tell you that one of the hardest parts about playing basketball overseas is being away from family and friends during the holidays.  The holidays that aren't celebrated over here tend to be especially difficult. Now, contrary to what some of my friends back home believe, Thanksgiving is an American holiday, and therefore not celebrated in France. Regardless, my teammates were pretty adamant about having some turkey and seeing what their American teammate could cook up, so on Monday, I hosted a French Thanksgiving in my apartment.

Although I have been a master green bean casserole maker for my family's Thanksgivings and Christmases for the past few years, this was the first Thanksgiving I had to cook the turkey and stuffing. I have to admit I was really nervous about taking on this task. Images of teammates throwing up undercooked turkey all over the court haunted me during my preparation weeks. Even after reading about 1,000 different ways to cook a turkey and things to be careful of, my friends’ stories of their first times cooking turkeys seemed to have a lot of obstacles. Hearing about how they cooked their first turkey upside down, forgot to take out the innards, or over-buttering the turkey and desperately trying to hold on as it slipped through hands and hands making its way down to the floor, I was certain I would mess it up somehow. I googled a turkey’s anatomy, how to clean a turkey, the best ways to use all parts of a turkey, and how to keep a turkey from drying out in the oven. Not to mention that a metric converter website was favorited, bookmarked, and just about always open on my computer throughout this process.

The night before the big day I was preparing the turkey and realized two things: number one, the innards were not bagged up for me, I would have to go fishing, and number two, the neck was still attached. As I felt my stomach rise up into my throat and debated back and forth about becoming a vegetarian, I succeeded in getting the liver, heart, and gizzards out as well as removing the neck from the body of the turkey. I also vowed to never buy a fresh turkey again.  

The feast!

The day of our French Thanksgiving, one of my teammates, Joyce, came over to help me out with the cooking. We put on some Adele (internationally loved) and got to peeling potatoes, cutting up veggies, and teamed up to keep the turkey moist throughout the day. Thank God for Joyce, because she really helped make everything go smoothly and made the preparation part of the day enjoyable. As the rest of my team started arriving, we youtubed how to carve the delicious smelling turkey, again teaming up as I held the slippery sucker and she carved the meat off like a pro.

My teammates brought foods to complete the meal including corn bread, sweet potatoes, salad, and what I found was the funniest dish of the night, a green bean casserole (which my teammate interpreted literally as green beans laid out in a casserole dish). As if that wasn’t enough food to fill us, we had a cheesecake, hot fudge cupcakes, and a chocolate cake for dessert. Keeping with my family tradition, we went around the table and I made all my teammates say what they were thankful for – some even said it in English for me!

All in all, my French Thanksgiving was awesome. I can honestly say it was the first time since coming here that I felt a bit at home, and for that, I am thankful.