Katie Donovan

February 16, 2004

The season officially started last Saturday with a lot of rain and some bad animé cartoons on the microscopic TV in our locker room. However, the "real" season started almost five weeks ago, and already we've had laughs and tears, injuries and homeruns, pounds of Dove chocolate and the dreaded "inchworms."

G-wack (Amanda) has been out for the past couple weeks with a pair of raccoon eyes (a ball coming in from the outfield took a bad bounce and hit her in the head), so the rest of the team has been rotating as honorary catchers. Even though we have to go 45 minutes earlier, I think we all appreciate doing agilities with the pitchers and catchers.

Lindsay Fay turned the big 2-1 last weekend, so several of us went to the Outback for dinner before relocating to her apartment to celebrate the evening. The dinner was fabulous, even if we did have to wait two hours to be seated. It also gave Lauren Haag plenty of time to reflect on her personal epiphany that not only is Lindsay Fay 21 years old, but she's also uniform number 21!

One of our two seniors Liz Hampson hosted a mini team dinner last Thursday to get us pumped up for our games. The leftover pizza from the swimming UAA tournament was plentiful, and Tracey Summa came to the rescue once again with marvelous chocolate cupcakes. Without her, it's quite possible we would starve – she also made a chocolate cake for Fay's birthday.

Mary and Nicole gave us an illuminating pre-game lecture on Valentine's Day. It turns out that Jen Harrigan is only one of many ways to make the holiday special and sexy! Good thing President Wagner didn't show up until later to throw out the first pitch of the game.

We have one more full week of practice before games start to truly get underway. We're all very optimistic heading into the season, and look forward to the challenges ahead. Not to mention that since T-Boggs is back with the team as a coach, we still have someone to booty dance our way into a softball frenzy!

Katie Donovan is a junior from Littleton, Colo. She would love to answer e-mail questions from Emory recruits and fans.