Buckle Up with Brooke

Thanksgiving break is a weird time for winter sports athletes. As mentioned in my prior blogs, I usually don't go home for the entire Thanksgiving break. We play a game two days prior to Thanksgiving and two days after the holiday. Thus, we stay on campus to practice and play games. This year, I decided to go home after our Saturday practice. It was an easy decision for me this time because I was mentally exhausted. The entire week of classes and practice drained me. Thankfully, we practiced early in the morning, so I made it home by lunch. My family knew I needed all the love in the world. My twin brother took me to dinner at the new Raising Cane's location in my area. We waited almost an hour for the food, but I enjoyed spending time with him. He is my best friend, but as we have grown older, our lives have taken us in different directions. To my surprise, my younger brother begged me to take him out for ice cream. He took control of the music in my car and asked for me to dr

On Monday, I attended the Networking Dessert hosted by Leader's Council. As a member of Leader's Council, I worked with a committee to plan and organize the event. Our committee's goal was to bring representatives of organizations across campus together to network. Ohio Northern University is a small campus, but it is hard to have organizations of different majors work together. Thus, the Networking Dessert was created.  The Dicke College of Business Administration gives its students the opportunity to network often. Networking is one of the most important skills to attain to grow your connections. The other colleges at Ohio Northern University do not place the same emphasis on networking. I found it interesting how you could easily tell which students were business majors. My teammate, Peyton Warnecke, is a double major between exercise physiology and management. Almost instantly, she made the comment, "You can tell which ones are the business majors because they have

Last weekend was a rare occasion for my team and I. We were granted Saturday and Sunday as off days. I use the term granted because this was a gift. Especially in the preseason, it is rare for us to have back-to-back off days. In this circumstance, those two days were the perfect opportunity to give the team the weekend to reset. We played in a scrimmage last Monday and didn't have a game scheduled until Friday of this week. Our coach understands the toll the season takes on us, mentally and physically, so we were given the weekend to come back prepared for game week. Most of my team took the weekend to go home and see their families. As much as I miss my family, my life was a mess at ONU. I have mentioned in prior blogs my new sense of responsibility in adulthood. By living in the apartments, I have created a new home for myself. My to-do list was two pages long. I needed to do around eight homework assignments, reorganize my closet, clean my bedroom, grocery shop, meal prep and

How do you coordinate 16 girls' schedules outside of practice time to take photos for over an hour? The answer is it is almost near impossible to do it. We spent the last two weeks trying to figure out the right time for our media night. Aside from coordinating personal schedules, we needed to coordinate schedules with a photographer. In addition, the marketing and communications department needed us to meet with them to create a hype video and take individual pictures. A combination of frustration and compromise finally brought us together tonight to do our media day. Media day is a huge deal to our team, so we made sure to go all out. Everyone brought props to make our pictures unique. I wore a combination of a cowgirl hat, a princess tiara and an ONU flag throughout my photo session. My parents are either going to be proud or really embarrassed when the photos are published. Either way, I am excited to see all the pictures. The marketing and communications team did a wonderful j

We played our first official scrimmage of the season last night! The entire day I was counting down the minutes until we left for Bluffton. I know Bluffton is right around the corner, but I was ready to play. The Bluffton scrimmage is an annual scrimmage. Both teams are top competitors in their respective conferences, so why wouldn't we want to play each other? The Bluffton scrimmage looked slightly different this year than last. Last year, we played around 20 girls, and this year we only have 12 healthy players. This is quite the adjustment, but I think we handled it well. Our team understands the lineup looks entirely different this year. We only returned two players from the starting lineup. The rest of the starters were seniors who graduated.  This team has an immense amount of potential for this season. Even though we didn't return starters, various rotation players are back this season. We are going to be a young team, but I will never use our age as an excuse. Last night

We have officially started basketball season! It is surreal to me how fast the first half of the semester has passed. How are fall sports almost done? I have a different perspective this season, and it has made the game more fun. As a sophomore, I know most of the drills and understand Coach Mark's expectations. It is nice to not be completely clueless. In addition, I know the goals we are working toward. The Ohio Athletic Conference is a tough conference to play women's basketball in. Any team can win on any night, so your team must show up ready to play. When I was a freshman, I played with no motivation. I didn't have any feelings toward the teams in our conference. Most of the time, I was a lost puppy on the court trying to keep up with everyone else.  Throughout the season, I was always fixated on copying the action of our senior post, Alisa Stalher. She was an important leader on our team. This year, I feel more obligated to lead our freshmen.  Ironically, only one of