Scheele Stories #2: Back on track by Christmas

Senior women's basketball player Megan Scheele checks back in with the second installment of her blog. Scheele's writing can also be seen on D3Hoops.com as part of the "Insider" feature on the Daily Dose.

2008 is almost over, our season is underway, and Edgewood College is in full gear going into the New Year. The team has gone through many obstacles and adversities to get here and have finally found ourselves and have been working well together. We started off with the season with three non-conference games.

Our first tournament was eye opening for most of the team, since many of them haven’t played basketball at the college level before. I could tell they were nervous, I was totally nervous before my first college game and expected them to be also. We played well at the tournament, the team got the first two games under their belts and found out what it was like to play at this level, and we found the things we need to work on to become a better team. We lost both games, but found out how each other played and looked to using that in our upcoming game.

Our next game was against the No. 1 team in the nation, UW-Whitewater. I know for the returners we wanted to redeem ourselves from the last time we played them; I do believe they scored a hundred points on us and so we weren’t going to let that happen again. We knew it was going to be a challenge for us, but we love challenges and we had nothing to lose going in, this game could only make us better. Whitewater was a tough team and had a well rounded one at that, but at half time we were only down by nine points. The game went on and we continued to battle with them, but in the end they got the best of us and we lost by 19 points. As a team we talked about what we could do to beat the number one team in the nation; we needed to shoot better and come up with more stops on defense and we would be right in the game.

At the end of November we finally played our first home game and our first conference game. The team was looking forward to this and to playing Concordia Wisconsin. They are one of our rivals and we didn’t lose to them by more than three points last year and did finally beat them for the first time in my career last year. Concordia beat us and it definitely wasn’t how we wanted to start off conference play. This was a tough time for our team, we were 0-4, had two players out with knee injuries for the rest of the season, and now only have nine players active on our roster. This wasn’t exactly how we wanted to start off our season and it was really hard to stay positive and keep everyone going. But we made a commitment with each other that we would do this together and we can just keep working hard and it will get better.

I didn’t really want to talk about this, but Dave, our sports information director said I had to. I’m on pace to break Edgewood College’s all-time scoring record. I haven’t really thought much about it, because I just want to make sure the team keeps playing better, but I suppose it will be really cool if it happens. As long as we keep winning games, that’s all I’m concerned about. [SID note: Megan has 1,700 career points and needs 155 more to break the record.]

That Concordia game was our wake up call on how to work and play together as a team. We knew we had to come together and get things done as a team. That’s exactly what happened; we are on a three-game winning streak and know that we can work together and win as a team. To me the first win is the hardest, but after we got that under our belts we continued on that path and have continued to win. Our next game is on Monday against Lakeland. We can’t wait to get back on the court and continue our winning streak on our home court.