Without a Coach and Players....Are We Still a Club?

I spent my weekend ignoring my work. I felt that supporting Penn athletics was clearly a better idea. In addition to Saturday's football game, I also went back to Penn on Sunday to watch a volleyball game against Seton Hall (although this time I was rooting for Seton Hall and my friend on the team). The drive back from Philadelphia after the game took 2 hours. I'm not exaggerating. I left Philadelphia at 7:30 and didn't arrive home until 9:30. For those of you keeping track at home, Bryn Mawr is 10 miles from Center City. I repeat. TWO HOURS! Apparently the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is run by Shipley parents, continuing in their efforts to keep me from getting home. By the time I made it home my head was throbbing and lights were flashing in my eyes. I stumbled into bed the minute I got home.

Why am I telling you this? Because this meant I didn't get any of the work I had to get done this weekend done. So I had to wake up crazy early on Monday morning and spend the day cranking out papers. I actually think I might have put more effort into them than anything else I would have spent the time on. Needless to say by 5 o clock, when I submitted the final one I was pretty beat and stressed out. I was excited, though, because we were having our first meeting of the squash club that night! I hadn't played since December and was anxious to get going again. Lots of people signed up at the activities fair and it was looking like it was going to be good. I got down to the bus stop to meet people. I waited. and waited. Evan, our treasurer, came down. We waited. The bus came. The bus left. It was just the two of us. Failure. We have no coach (let's not get started on that story), we have no players....we're not a club. Evan and I drop off the giant equipment bag in my room and head over to Haverford to play by ourselves. After about 15 minutes someone shows up looking for the club. We're overjoyed! A member! But we don't have any equipment.....So we rent a racquet ball racquet from the front desk....whatever works I guess. Now we're faced with another problem, Evan and I have to teach the girl how to play. After three years the responsibility has fallen on us. We don't even know where to begin. So we just start hitting the ball. Through the grace of God...the girl can play! She's making contact with the ball, she's understanding the rules....this is a miracle. I can't even describe the ridiculousness that is the first day that people are trying to learn the sport. It's usually chaos. But...she can play! About 20 minutes before we were about to leave, another girl shows up. She said she had played last semester. Evan and I decided to give them the two squash racquets that we had and watch them, just to see what they could do. And they could both play! I mean, we're by no means competition ready, playing publicly is not exactly on our horizon anytime soon. Evan and I high five. Maybe this club won't be as much of a failure as we thought it would be.