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Thursday, December 8 Web Journal
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Dec. 8, 2005 In Geoff's journal on Tuesday, he mentioned that Julia and I have been through a lot, physically, to get to where we are today so I thought I would expound on that a little bit. My injury problems started when I was at Tennessee. Right at the end of preseason my freshman year there, I dislocated my shoulder so I had to redshirt. I wasn't really happy at Tennessee so I decided to transfer to Ohio and right after I arrived here, I tore my ACL the day before spring ball started. My knee was just all torn apart so I had surgery and missed the first half of the season that fall. My junior year, I tore my meniscus again so there was a lot of pain and crunching in my knee. But once you get on the floor, you kind of forget about the pain and just play. I had to have surgery after the season and they did some drilling in there. Last year, I had some personal issues that I had to deal with. They were just some medical problems that I had to take care of and had surgery to get rid of. That was really tough and I missed some games because of it. We also had to deal with the death of a father to one of the players on our team so that was difficult and we all tried to support her the best we could because we're a close family. This season, we were maxing out in the weight room and I developed an umbilical hernia that I still have. It really limited me at the beginning of the season because it hurt a lot when I was piking and stuff like that. And I'm not allowed to do any more Olympic lifts so it limited me in the weight room quite a bit. It feels better now but it's still there and makes me think to myself, "Okay, what else could go wrong?" If I had to rate myself health-wise right now on a scale of one to 10, I'm a good seven. I still have arthritis in both my knees so I have to take medicine for that everyday. That's never going to go away so I'm a good seven or maybe even an eight but I try not to think about it. All the success that we've had makes it easier to forget about the injuries. Capping my college career this way makes it all worth it. My parents always tell me there's no better way to do it because I've been through all this stuff and I'm ending my fifth year this way. It's just remarkable, it really is. I use it to help our younger players who are having problems. If you were at the Ohio State match last Saturday, you might have noticed a group of people sitting in the bleachers holding "Holly the Hammer" signs. They were some friends from my hometown of Pataskala who came to watch me play. I earned the name "Hammer" in high school because after I would hit the ball, the crowd would start saying, "What time is it... hammer time!" Kids even started showing up at our games with their chests painted, spelling H-A-M-M-E-R. And the name stuck, even here in college. After Saturday's match, we really celebrated that night and were on cloud nine all day Sunday but when we came in on Monday to get the gameplan and Geoff started talking about Arizona, that's when we started to focus on Friday's match. It set in even more yesterday when we landed in California and we said to each other, "Hey, we're in the Sweet 16 and we really need to focus now." We're happy to be here but we want to play beyond Friday. We need to take care of our business. As Geoff told us at the end of practice on Tuesday, this is a business trip. When you look at the other teams in the Sweet 16, they are all amazing programs. Just four years ago, when Julia and I joined the team, we were barely getting 200 people to our games and people on campus didn't even know we had a volleyball team. Now we get over 1,000 fans to our home matches but even after we beat Ohio State, someone in the stands told us, "Your team's not bad for a MAC school." That just angers us even more and shows us we have to keep proving ourselves. If we have to keep pulling off upsets, then that's what we're going to have to do. Hopefully, we'll show Arizona and their fans we're not too bad as well. Go Bobcats! |
