The Run Ends

Hello Everyone,

I come today to share with you that we have lost, and are out of the cup. It was a crazy game, but we did end up playing another tough team. It was Ramata Hasharon, they have Jia Perkins of the Chicago Sky, Ebony Hoffman Of the Indiana Fever, and Erin Phillips who played for Connecticut Suns. Their team is a really good team!. It was a close game the entire way. They led the entire game but we kept it close -- no more than six the entire time. We did have a great yet scary surprise though. Our teammate Charde Houston decided to play on her hurt leg right before the game. I was so shocked and scared, I was not sure what to say to her or anything. I saw that she had made up her mind to play, so I just said a prayer with her and left it in God's hand to protect her. She came out and played really well for us. She gave us all that she had and we couldn't have asked for anything else. I am happy that she is on my team. Anyway the overall game was a sloppy one for both teams. It came down to 6.2 secs. We were coming out of a time out and the other team had set up a defense to trap me. I broke the trap and went a completely different way from the two defenders, I got the ball, and had a clear path to the basket -- I am running straight to the basket and as I go up for the shot one of the defenders rotated over and under cut my legs. I got the shot off, and the ball went up in the air, inside the rim and rattled back out. The refs of course did not call a foul, and our coach went crazy. He ran out on the floor and screamed at the refs and everything. It was no turning back though and we had to walk off with the loss.

It was a crazy game, but it did show that we can battle with any team in this league. And although we didn't come away with the cup championship we are gunning for the league championship. I believe that we can take it.

I will be going home soon to be with my family. I will probably miss Christmas with them but I will bring in the New Year with them. I am looking forward to seeing them. I miss them all very much.

We will have at least 2 weeks offs so until next time everyone, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year's! I hope that Santa brought everyone what they wanted and I hope that this new year God brings you all as much happiness as the Year before.

God Bless Everyone!

I will talk to you all next year.

Meek

The Run to the Championship

Hello everyone, I want to start off by saying happy holidays to all. I hope that everyone is enjoying their time with their loved ones. I am still in Israel and probably wont get to make it home for Christmas. It is ok though, I will still have Christmas with my family when I get back there.

Ok let me fill you all in on whats been going on with me over here. This week has been a very tense week. We have been practicing and preparing for Cup play. During cup play it is like the NCAA'S, it is one and done. So throughout the week everyone was really on edge, we were playing Ramla for our first game, and they had knocked the club that I am playing for (Ra'annna) out the past couple of years so it was really important to concentrate on this up and coming game. After all the hard practicing and getting after each other pretty hard, the club treated us to a spa day. Something like a team bonding. We were able to get a full body massage, use the jacuzzi, as well as lay up in a suite and just relax. It was really a fun night. We all felt so good and relaxed after that.

The next day I surprised my teammates with gifts. They do not celebrate Christmas here but they do celebrate Hanukkah. I wanted to try and put the Christmas/Hanukkah spirit within the team and I think it worked. They were all so surprised and so excited. They thought that I was crazy to go out and buy each one of my teammates a gift. This is evidently not something that is done here very often, because they just kept saying that I was crazy. The only thing that mattered to me was that they were happy and that they enjoyed and appreciated their gifts. It was not about the money at all, and the smiles on their faces was priceless. It made it all worth it.
So now it is time for the game and one of our key players was having some knee trouble and before the game we knew for sure that she was not going to play. That was a little nerve racking because she is very important to our team, by the way sorry it is Charde Houston that I am speaking about. Everyone had to give a little more against a team that was almost favored to win anyway. Once the game started, we came out a little slow, but with a not so good performance in the first half, we were still only down by 7 at the half. During the second half once we tied the score the lead change would go back and forth until we finally got up by like 6. From then on we kept the lead, but Ramla who has Tan White and Nikki Anosike on their team as well as Adia Barnes would not just go away. They fought until the end.

This was a really hard fought game and I was so proud of my teammates for the way that we all stepped up and gave a little extra in Charde's absence. Now we sit and wait to see who it is that we play again. For some apparent reason they are going to draw out of a hat the two teams again for the second round. I have never seen this happen before, it is usually the first round and that's it. But not here, plus this year they are doing things a little different. Usually the cup games are spread out to play, but this year they are doing them all in one week. It is 3 games in 5 days. So if we keep winning, which I hope that we will, that will be our schedule from now until the break. I am looking forward to the next game and I am interested to see who it will be. Sorry everyone as of right now I don't know so I guess I will just have to let you all know next time. Ok I am off to bed now. Wish us luck for the cup, hopefully we will come away with the championship.

Please have a safe and Happy Holiday.

Merry Christmas to all!

Meek

One and Done..

Hello fellow bloggers!

I can finally say that this week is a little slower than the past. We only had one game this week and we played it yesterday. We played a team called Ne Tanya. They have two players that I know, and I know the lady tiger followers would know for sure.

One is former lady tiger Erica White who played pretty well for her club, and the other is Natasha Brackett, a former SEC player from Auburn. It was a pretty close game throughout. I had some foul issues and due to the aggressiveness that I tend to play on defense, the refs were not too hesitant to blow the whistle. I wasn't even guarding and American either. Usually they will allow the Americans to play, but yesterday for some strange reason that was not the case.

Anyways, I fouled out with like 15 mins to go in the game. My teammates were nervous but, guess what, they did what they were supposed to do. They held it together and performed well, and we walked away with a victory. As I cheered them on as I was on the bench I became even more proud of being on this team with a group women that just refused to give up.

This is all for this week. There is not very much more to this week besides two-a-days and preparing for the game on Monday. I am suppose to go by some of my teammates apartment so that they can teach me how to play poker, not really sure how this will go but hey we will see! If I don't learn it or enjoy it I will at least be able to say that I got out of the house and chilled with my teammates. It will at least be an outing.

Ok I must go now I am a little under the weather. I have a soar throat and a stuffy nose. So until next time I will talk to everyone later.

I will keep you all updated on my poker skills ...........

Hey!

Today was a good day... it was a day after a win that we needed and just had to get. This morning after an hour of practice we did something amazing. We had a scrimmage with the Special Olympic kids!

We had a blast. During every time out and half time everyone danced with one another. The ones that didn't get to perform in the scrimmage were able to leave the bleachers and come down and dance with everyone. My teammates and I had a blast. I think I already said that, LOL.

Today was a good day. I was very happy and so were the Olympic athletes. They really enjoyed themselves as well as enjoyed us. But they just don't know that they were just as important to us as a whole. At the end of the event they gave my teammate the MVD award. At first I wasn't exactly sure what that was, and we thought that it was similar to the MVP award so my teammates and I joked with Charde about how it is ironic that she received that award and not any of the actually athletes that it was for. LOL. But it was the MVD award which mean the Most Valuable Dancers. We all fell out laughing, but we understood it then. If anyone knows Charde they will know that she loves to dance and she was truly all over the place. She danced to every song that was played it was hilarious. We had a blast.

I know this was short, but I'll be back. I wanted to share this quick moment with you all.

Until next time....

Thanksgiving Abroad

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I have to say that I am little jealous of those that are reading this from their homes right now. That means that you are there with all the good food that is prepared for this wonderful day. You are there with family, friends, and loved ones. I do hope that everyone had a great Thanksgiving though. We all have so much to be thankful for these days. I, for one, am very thankful for all the things that have happened to me and for me in my life thus far. Whether it was good, bad, or indifferent I am thankful for it, because I know I learned from it, grew from, or just was happy and blessed that it occurred.

I am healthy; family is doing well despite having our first holiday without my grandmother. I am abroad getting paid to do what it is that I love to do, I am surrounded by positive people and positive influences, I am meeting new people and learning about different cultures. I am getting the opportunity to see different parts of the world. Like I mentioned in a few blogs ago, I am thankful for the new addition to our family, my little niece JaʼNiya. My sister is healthy after giving birth to her, my other sister and brothers are all doing well, and so are my other nieces and nephews. Mom and dad are both strong and healthy. So I am very thankful. I am also thankful to be able to share my life experience with all of you that are following and keeping up with me.

Now I will share with you how my Thanksgiving eve and Thanksgiving were.

Let me fill you in on this great trip that I had to Russia.

First to begin with, we had a four hour flight to Moscow. Once we landed we took a bus for 10 hours to Kursk (another part of Russia). Now let me share with the size of this bus. It was smaller than the short yellow buses in America. There was very limited space and there was no room for us to put our luggage underneath at all, so you know what that meant, yep the luggage was on the bus with us as well. It was the most uncomfortable ride that I have ever witnessed in all my days of traveling. Not only were we cooped up on that little bus, it was also snowing very hard so the driver was being extra cautious with his drive so it took about 11-12 hours instead of 10.

While driving of course there were bathroom stops and we stopped at this one rest place alongside the road and the most unusual thing happened. When we opened the door the lady that was in charge of that part of the building says to us in Russian that we had to pay to use the rest room. Yes yaʼll pay! It was a great thing that we have a teammate that is Russian, because without her we would have never made it through this trip. Anyway there was problem that came about with the restroom, no one on our team had exchanged money yet so none of us had any rubles, which is Russian money, so the lady then says OK three for a dollar. Yes One American Dollar. I was just standing there smiling, because I have never seen such advertising like that in my life. Not when it came to using the rest room. But luckily we were able to give her a dollar to use the restroom. If not it would have been an even longer trip.

Now we are back in the little van and off we go heading towards Kursk again. About 3 to 4 hours later we stop again, but this time the bathroom is inside of the store. A problem occurs there as well. The clerk at the store was very upset for some apparent reason and gave all of us a hard time. She did allow us to use the restroom, but she refused to sell us anything out of the store. I am still unsure of what exactly happened for her to get that angry but I do know that she was arguing with our bus driver for a lengthy period of time. I just wanted to get in and get out. I was not feeling like we were the most welcomed people out there in Russia, even though I couldnʼt speak the language I did understand the body language and the tone in most of their voices. So I just sat back and observed how things were unfolding.

Finally after getting back on the road we get to our hotel, (now like 8:30 am) and we had left Israel at 2 pm the day before. Once we get there, we had to drop our bags off to our room and go straight back down for breakfast. My body was thinking that it was bed time not breakfast time, but I went down to eat and be with the team anyway. From here on out we are just eating and sleeping, trying to rest up for the game the following day. We did have a light practice that night so that we could get a better feel for their gym.

Finally it's game time and we come out playing very well in the beginning. We were only down by two points by half time, so we were somewhat pleased especially since this team had beat our team by forty points in our gym the last time we played them. This was before I was on the team, so I wasnʼt exactly sure what had happened the game before, I just know what I was told. So being down by 2 at the half was a great thing. Then everything went wrong from there. The second half we were a totally different team, and not in a good way. Some of the girls just stop playing, it was almost like they had given up, like the were content with just playing twenty minutes. Some were still fighting while others were in a rut. The Russian team did what most would do. They took advantage of that and opened the lead up within a blink of an eye.

I was fairly upset, but not because we lost the game, it was the way that we lost it. We didnʼt go down fighting in the last 20 minutes of the game. From there we went back to the hotel, showered, ate, packed our bags and were back on the road for another 10 hour bus ride back to the Moscow airport. This time it was a much bigger bus and it was a lot more comfortable. We did make one or two stops but didnʼt face as much attitude from the clerks as we did when we were going to Kursk. As I sat there and just watched, I wondered to myself how can these people always be so angry and mean. I didnʼt want to just assume anything, nor say that they were just some rude, not so nice people, because I donʼt really know their culture like that so I didnʼt want to judge. All I came away with was that they were not from the same type of culture as I was from, and I had to accept that and move one. Now donʼt get me wrong, I am not saying that there are not any Americans like that, I just havenʼt had to deal with any like that. One thing that I have learned while traveling abroad is that you have to adapt to the culture, things will not always be what you are use to so that what I try to do.

Finally we get to the airport, and it is 7 am but the problem with that is our flight is not until 2 pm. Another long wait before we get on a 4 hour flight back to Israel. But wait, of course we did have a little encounter when we got to the airport as well. Our bus driver dropped us off at the wrong terminal with all of our luggage and of course he left once we were all off the bus. Once we got in there our Russian teammate was trying to talk to the people in there to figure out what it was that we had to do. They told her that we had to catch a bus to the other terminal because it was too far to walk, and there was no way that we could have walked through the airport to get there. Their airports are not exactly like the ones in America.

Now once we get back outside and we are waiting for the bus to arrive it was freezing outside. It wasnʼt snowing anymore, but it was still cold. While standing out there with luggage and all, we were informed that once the bus gets there that we would have to pay 500 rubles for each piece of luggage that we put on the bus. Management was not too pleased with this, but what were we to do. So we get on the bus and finally get to the terminal that we need to be. We still had some time before we had to take off, so some of us found outlets to get on our computers, while others found places to lay their heads for awhile because they were extremely tired. This was one tough trip, but we did make it though.

Until next time have a safe and blessed Holiday.

Meek