University of Washington Official Athletic Site - Women's Basketball
April 18, 2013 | Women's Basketball
Kayla Burt Player Diary
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Nov. 10, 2005
Hello Dawg Fans!! After a two week hiatus I am back to give you a little of the inside scoop of our team. A lot has happened in the past two weeks. Let's see…..we had our annual team Halloween party at our coaches' house, we had a few birthday celebrations (myself included!), some great practices, and of course our first exhibition game. We have so much going on right now and all we can try to do is keep ourselves level-headed, rested, well-hydrated, and ready for any situation at any time.
For most of the team and the rest of the university everyone was studying for midterms last week as the middle of the quarter had arrived. I, on the other hand, have one class and two independent studies and therefore was not studying for midterms for the first time in my five year career. Oh the luxuries of being a fifth year senior! Midterms are pretty much the worst thing ever but once they are done a huge load is lifted from your shoulders and it's almost like you were never worried about them to begin with because they are done and over with so fast. Maybe that doesn't make sense to you all or maybe some disagree but I think that they are over way faster than how much we stressed and fretted over them. Just a personal opinion…..
Our annual Halloween party was pretty interesting this year. The theme was REGGAE! Let me tell you all this first….Halloween is our assistant coach Mike's favorite "holiday" and he picks the themes every year. I think this year's theme was the hardest to formulate a costume for but all Mike had to do was throw on a black long haired wig and he was ready to go. You looked so natural Mike! The rest of us looked great as well with what we had to come up with. We had a few Bob Marley t-shirts, some nice head wraps, a few locks, and the classic t-shirt promoting the legalization of marijuana (all as a joke of course!) The highlight though, as it is every year, was our lone freshman Heidi singing to the song of her choice. She picked Gretchen Wilson's "Hell Yeah" song. What happens is Mike puts in the music, Heidi puts on the headphones, and we hear her try to sing. She can hear the music in her headphones but there is no sound to all of us except for her voice. It was hilarious! She had the twangy country girl sound goin on: It is definitely not easy to get up there and sing in front of your whole team but Heidi is the special type and we all love her for it.
Practices have been great and leading up to our first exhibition game. We had a cool opportunity to go and practice at the Furtado Center downtown where the Sonics and Storm practice last week. We had a great workout and I think everyone enjoyed the unique change in practice- if only for a day.
I want to say a special thanks to all of our fans that came out for our first exhibition game this past weekend. I know it's hard for our fans to come to these games because we usually win by a lot, all the while not always playing our best basketball. We usually have some first game jitters and make a lot of mental mistakes that we shouldn't be making but we have to start somewhere to see where we need improvement. I think our game on Sunday was indicative of a lot of things we want to do this season and there were other things that were probably not indicative of what you're going to see all year. I thought in the first half we did a great job of pressuring our opponent into making a lot of mistakes and turning the ball over and we were able to get in passing lanes going to other way. Our offense looked good in the game as well although there were some mistakes that we will fix. We set good screens to get each other open; I thought we got the ball into the post a lot and saw great looks from doing so. There were a lot of things that worked out really well for us I think we just need to pound the fact that we have to bring that in-your-face intense defense and energy to generate our offense. It is only going to get better and I think we're off to a great start! We have one more week to practice practice practice and we are off to start a great year of Husky Basketball. We hope you all have an opportunity sometime to come see us play and watch us put into action what we have worked so hard at all year!
Go Huskies!!!
KB
