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Hello!
 
Hope everyone had a great weekend!  Its good to know that things are warming up, and spring is (hopefully) just around the corner!

It has been a good week.  I have officially been here for a week now, but it feels like I have been here a lot longer.  I don’t know if it is because I am comfortable here, or if it is because I am bored, haha but either way it has been good.

I have been super lucky in that there is a beach right across the street from where I am living at the moment, and I just go run down by the water everyday.  I have decided since being down here that I am definitely a warmer climate type of girl.

Other then running everyday, my schedule has been pretty flexible.  At the moment, I am living with the lady that got me over here in the first place.  Her name is Lori Chizik, and she actually played against my mom and aunts in university, and with My university coach when she moved to Calgary to play her last year.  I also played against her daughter in my 5th year as she played at U of C.  It is kind of cool, and we have a lot of little connections so we talk a lot of basketball.  She actually just got named one of the assistant coaches for the Australian Sr. Women’s National Team this week, and she is really excited about it. She also assistant coaches with their U 17 national team, and is a commentator for the WNBL (which is Australia’s highest league that plays during their summer).  That league just finished on Sunday with the grand finale, and I got to go with her to the game and watch live as she commentated.  It was a pretty great atmosphere, and actually really cool to see the set up that goes into a live televised game.

This weekend was a long weekend in parts of Australia, and probably one of the last nice weekends of the summer, so of course we got to the beach as well.  I attached a photo of a beach that I went to with a teammate on Saturday.  It was so gorgeous, and the water was warm (not like the 58F degree water we get at home).

Saturday we also went to a pre-season tournament that our league hosted, and watched some of the teams that we will play against.  Everywhere that I have been has played a different style of basketball, and in Australia it is probably some of the most fun basketball I have seen.  It is probably also the place that I think fits my game best.  It is very fast paced, with point guards looking to push the ball in transition as the first option, but then if there is no option, it is fairly structured. It is amazing to me the speed and the skill level of all the athletes here.  Even there youth athletes play that style of basketball, and are some of the most fundamentally sound athletes I have seen at any age.  It has been really cool to see a culture that has a love and passion for basketball that you don’t see in Canada, and I have already fallen in love with that aspect of Australia.  It is awesome to be in an environment that has the similar focus as you do.

As for our team, we have only had on practice and one test game, and I think that we will have a pretty good year.  In the test game we did a few really good things, but you could tell that we hadn’t played together much as we didn’t read each other that well, and struggled a bit offensively in taking good shots.  We had just put in our offense as well so we are playing it a bit too structured, but I am confident that we will move past this stuff and have a great season. I have a feeling that our team will be using more ball screens then I have been used to using, and playing the 1 position I will be the person using them a lot more then I have in the past.  So thanks to IMPACT for drilling ball-screen reads into my head! Woohoo for ball screens!!

Hmm, I can’t really think of anything else to update at the moment.  I hope that you all have a good week! Good luck to everyone who is going into playoffs this week/weekend!

Talk to you next week!

Lauren