I have been waiting four years to finally play in the Olympic games again and the time is finally here! We have played two games, one against Venezuela and today against Australia. Today was a close game and our first challenge, so it was exciting to see our team respond the way we did. The adrenaline was flowing and the excitement was definitely strong as we pulled off the win!! We play every day until the 19th and I know these days are just going to fly by, but we have been trying to take advantage of the small amounts of free time we have. Every night we have a team meeting and a part of that meeting two players are chosen to “present”. In that presentation we are supposed to choose an animal that best represents our team against the competition we are facing the next day. The chosen two start off by doing charades so everyone (players vs. staff) can try and guess the animal that is going to be presented. The first night it was Finch and Tairia, and they chose an American Eagle because of how it represents our country. Their charade was Finch using her enormous wing span to sweep across the room and land on Tairia (who was the prey) … very funny stuff. Last night the chosen two were myself and Vicky Galindo. We chose to do killer whales, and our charade was Vicky running around the room trying to kill me (for first word) and then we both pretended to breach the ocean to get them to guess whale. Even more humorous as I am sure most of you can imagine … Oh, and the players are beating the staff 2-0 by the way. The reasons we chose the killer whale were because of how they travel in pods (averaging about 15 per pod, just like our team) and how they pride themselves on communicating to both help each other out and to attack their prey, which is one of our biggest strengths. Vicky drew a picture of some killer whales traveling together through the ocean with the words Fierce, Fast and Family written above them. Tairia had drawn a picture of an American Eagle and Coach Candrea taped both pictures up in our dugout for our games. Just some interesting fun stuff on what is going on behind the scenes

We also made a trip out to Nike yesterday where we got to meet up with family (instead of from behind a fence after the game) get some really fun free gear and have some amazing food — they have a chef they brought in from Italy that makes homeade Italian every day … yum! Speaking of dinners, for tonight’s dinner we actually had Mexican food in China! There is a training center we (US athletes) can sneak off to that imports food from the US, and they had Mexican tonight. We love eating at the Olympic village with all of the athletes and all the different types of food, but something like Mexican food is unheard of here in the village so today was a welcomed treat by our whole team (especially me!!).

Well we still have a long road ahead of us, and I am sure much more excitement to come. I hope you are all watching at home and cheering loud enough so we can hear you thousands of miles away here in China!!
GO USA!!