If you live in Iowa, you know the extremes of the word - winter. Especially lately, the weather thinks it's funny to tease us Spring Hopefuls. It's been abnormally warm (actually meaning just above freezing), then bitterly cold (very, very cold) off and on for the past couple weeks. One annoying thing you forget about during this mostly-dirty-always-slushy period of the winter is the invisible black ice. The previous abnormally warm day which turned into a biting Iowa winter night leaves small, vicious surprises which can actually cause incredibly unpleasant catastrophes (or at least send your limbs flailing as your struggling body works to regain its composure). Just when you think you have your footing, these little icy patches sneak up on you and WHAM!!!! -you're leveled - flat on your butt (or face..ouch) and you didn't even see it coming. What hurts more? Your pride? or your tailbone every time you sit down in class?

Well recently, Simpson Women's Basketball has hit some icy patches. We had our second loss to Buena Vista on Jan. 24 and our third to Luther College on Feb. 4. The first loss to BV left both our pride and our tailbones very sore. A little shaken, we worked to regain our composure after we slipped, and we were able to struggle through the next two games versus Dubuque and Cornell. However, we slipped and fell again, but this time it was to Luther. A combination of a lot of things contributed to the struggling play and losses like - shaken confidence, playing not to lose instead of playing to win, and forgetting how important this game really is to all of us - are only a few. After rattling our brains to come up with a solution as to why this sudden loss of confidence was happening, we finally decided that taking a day off completely from basketball was the best thing to do, and that's exactly what we did. It was probably one of the better things that could've happened. After a very motivating and positive team meeting, we decided that this was our last chance to play with just this group of girls.

Every year is different, and we just had to remind ourselves how great and how much fun it is to play with this bunch of girls. (also refer back to blog entitled: What to do when you don't know what to do) You could even tell from the bleachers during the Wartburg game that we had finally regained our footing and were pushing forward with excitement, love for the game, and the desire to win. With the recent past struggles, plus the win versus Wartburg College, I'd say we'd learned our lesson about our own black ice. I don't think we'll be slipping again anytime soon. J