UT junior Petra Dizdar writes from Tennessee today two days after the Longhorns' 5-2 win at William and Mary. Today, Dizdar and the Longhorns prepare for their second match of their road trip when they take on Tennessee.
Ah, life is interesting! Indeed...
I don't know where to start with my story telling! I guess I will go chronologically. We beat William and Mary Monday afternoon, 5-2 (Mia Marovic and I apologize for those two points).
Great news came with our doubles play. As I wrote in one of my entries, we have been trying to figure out our best doubles pairs, and from our first performance it looks like this lineup could do it for us. Mia and Cozi (Courtney Zauft) dominated at one, and Kelly (Baritot) and K-Dog (Kendra Strohm) did the same at number two. Marija (Milic) and I still have to work a bit on keeping our focus from start to finish and staying aggressive in the most crucial points.
Our singles play was great as well, as everyone finished relatively fast. "Short and sweet," as our coaches like to say. After the match we decided to get ready to leave Williamsburg because we had a 6 a.m. flight for Tennessee on Tuesday. It just made more sense to sleep in one of the airport hotels in Norfolk.
Then, things got interesting. First, we decided to go watch a movie in one of the nearby movie theaters. The team split between the cutesy, romantic comedy, "Failure To Launch" (with our "neighbor" Matthew McConaughey), and the scariest horror movie ever, "The Hills Have Eyes". Let me just say that those brave souls who watched the latter movie ran as fast as they could to get back to the hotel. Our coaches would have been so proud!
Anyway, we all went to sleep soon after the movies because we had to meet in the lobby at 4:30 a.m. So, as we are enjoying our well-deserved sleep, a weird noise goes off at around 2:20 a.m. My roommate, Mia, thought it was our alarm, while I was still in denial that something was going on. After a couple of minutes we realized it was not an alarm clock, and we looked outside. Nothing was going on, but we "foreigners" were suspicious. We tried to call the front desk, but all of the lines were busy. So, we turned to one last source of information, our assistant coach, Darija Klaic. She was confused and told us to just go downstairs because it just may well be a fire alarm (even though it really did sound more like an annoying alarm clock).
Of course, Mia and I packed all of our stuff and went downstairs. Smart girls, huh? As we came downstairs, we saw a bunch of other people standing in their pajamas. There were four fire trucks with lots of firemen walking around. But, we saw none of our teammates. So, I started making calls. The rest of the team was still asleep.
Ristine (Olson) thought I was giving her a silly prank by telling her to get out of her bed and come down. Kendra had not heard anything 20 minutes into the "fire alert".
After a while we all bundled up in the parking lot and decided to continue our "nap" in the cars. It was not until 3:20 a.m. that we were allowed to go back to our beds. False alarm! Our volunteer assistant coach and I joked that we should sue for the most ineffective fire alarm ever (he is finishing law school). So, we decided to give it a try and sleep for another hour. Some of us could sleep, and some were way too ticked off to sleep. Some were still freaked out from that horror movie and swore they would never sleep again. Ha, right!
After that exciting night we headed to the airport to spend half of the day getting to Knoxville, Tenn. I mean, why can't we just fly straight there? We went from Norfolk to Atlanta to Knoxville. And, what did we do as soon as we got there? Yes, we went to practice. Playing half asleep, we ran for tennis balls and tried to make the most of it, but I know we all just wanted to pass out in our hotel rooms. Soon enough, we did and we slept forever. You just don't know how good it feels to sleep until you don't have it.
But we are here now, feeling fresh and rested and awaiting another match-up. We play Tennessee on Wednesday at 5 p.m. We will definitely have time to sleep this time around. The weather has been really nice, in spite of the tornado watches that have been going on here for the past few days. It should be even warmer on Wednesday, so we are excited to go for another good win.
Our coach, Patty Fendick-McCain, is still waiting for us to get back before giving birth to her third child, and we are all cheering her on. We hope she can wait that long! Hugs and kisses to her, and good luck to us!
Texas Fight!
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