Oct. 10, 2008
Sophomore Simone Trice of the Georgia Tech women’s basketball team shares her experience at the Yellow Jackets preseason team-building exercise. As a “rookie”, Simone was blindfolded and led by her teammates to the top of Stone Mountain. The team then split up and carved pumpkins.
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” That quote by Martin Luther King explains my experience I had yesterday bonding with my teammates.
It started in the locker room; Coach Joseph showed motivating clips of the past season’s games that demonstrated what it is going to take to reach all of our goals for the upcoming season. Shortly after, coach told us we were going somewhere but know one had any idea and all of the “rookies” would be blindfolded the entire time. As a rookie, I was a bit nervous at first. We did not have a clue what was going on. Each of us was assigned partners that would guide us wherever we traveled. So we got in vans and took a long ride to an unknown location. Finally when we arrived we got out the vans, still blindfolded and began to walk on what felt like a trail of some sort. This journey began to get a bit rough, I soon felt myself going up a hill, climbing up huge rocks, stepping into puddles and tripping over tree stumps. Day-Day (Shaday Woolcock) and Bizz (Brigitte Ardossi) were my guides and it was very pertinent that they communicated well and I listened so we could make to wherever we were going. They did a good job for the most part, I did scrape my leg a little but at least I did no fall like some others might have. About 30 minutes later we made it to our destination. Soon as everyone arrived we took our blindfolds off and we were on top of Stone Mountain. I knew we had traveled up some kind of hill because I felt it in my calves but I did not know we were that high up. All of us rookies were amazed at what we accomplished blindfolded with the help of our teammates.
This was a Coach Joseph lesson of “blind faith”, having “trust” even when you don’t know what lies ahead. Being “patient” played a big role in this experience as well as “communication”. All of these things are key factors in our upcoming season and as rookies I believe we learned a lot from this experience. Quite surprisingly, we did not complain at all. We did exactly what we were told although we did not know where we were going. In the end, we succeeded and in relating these concepts to our goals of an ACC championship, beating ALL in state opponents and making it to the Final Four for a chance to become NCAA Champions, Its comes down to having faith. Like Coach Joseph says, “Choice not Chance”. To top the day off we had some great pizza and then had a pumpkin decorating contest which Bizz and I should have won but the judges voted for the ugliest pumpkin to win and that was Meme (Metra Walthour) and I believe Nisha’s (LaQuananisha Adams) pumpkin. It was all around a great time with the team, the coaches and support staff before we depart for fall break and come back “Ready” for the season!
