| This season fans will have the opportunity to see first-hand what it it’s like to be a part of the women’s basketball program at Georgia Tech in a series of online journal entries at Ramblinwreck.com written by freshman Shaday “Day-Day” Woolcock. |
Check out Day-Day’s latest entry below:
Jan. 10, 2008
Entry #5
“One who fears failure limits her activities.
Failure is only the opportunity to more
intelligently begin again.”
Henry Ford
With Atlantic Coast Conference play a week away, we knew it was time to buckle down and prepare even harder than we had for our out-of-conference games. Preparation was key during this time. As a team, we were building up more confidence each day and challenging each other to get better. We were fortunate to have our ACC opener against a very talented team, UNC, and we were going to go out and play as hard as we could against them. “It doesn’t matter what’s on your jersey,” Coach Jo would say time and time again, “cause underneath it, both teams have on sports bras and tights.” And she was so right. As a result, after practicing hard and being fully focused, we were ready to head off to North Carolina and be FEARLESS out on the floor. We knew this game would fall into the hands of the team who won the most hustle points, the team who dived on the floor for lose balls, and the team who crashed the boards for second chance shots.
After a great warm up, it was jump ball time and the Yellow Jackets and I were ready to get off to a great start. It didn’t really happen that way though. UNC made a few easy baskets on us and after a couple of minutes ran off the clock, they had gained a slight lead. We have never been the type of team to “get back on our heels” or not fight back though, so we continued to challenge them. By halftime the score read 47-28 and we were pretty disappointed but not defeated. We came back out the second half with the same FEARLESS attitude we started the game off with. Fired up and ready to go, we played the second half with much more heart and although the score didn’t read in our favor at the sound of the final buzzer, we had a lot of positives to be proud of that we were not quite aware of.
Just as we learn from other disappointments we may have, we definitely gained more knowledge on what the ACC is all about due to this game. As a freshman, this was a great experience for me. I have always known the ACC to be one of the best conferences to compete in, but to actually get to experience my first competition was just as exciting as it was informing. Even though the final score read 99-78, there were a lot of positives the coaches were able to point out from the game. For one, Duckie (Jacqua Williams) set an ACC record with 11 steals which was just amazing, especially against such a highly ranked team. Another positive was we had five players in double digits and with the scoring in just the second half we were neck and neck. It’s just they had built up such a lead and it had become very hard to recover. At the end of the day, after hearing a game review from coach, we realized that we had only beaten ourselves. As a matter of fact, over half of UNC’s points came from them scoring off of our turnovers and our fouls. These facts didn’t bother me too much because these are things we can fix. Turnovers and fouls are two main components that we have control over and you can mark my word, on Feb. 10th the Yellow Jackets and I are going to come out with the same FEARLESS attitude and will once again give it our all against the Tar Heels. And this time it’s at home.
– Shaday “Day-Day” Woolcock
