Celebration

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As most of you who follow athletics at SIU know, the women's basketball team had been struggling a little bit during the beginning of our conference season. But, I am not going to dwell on any of the losses that have occurred. What I am going to do is tell you how sweet the victory felt when we defeated the Aces of Evansville Monday night.

During this entire season we have been through ups and downs, but the one thing our team always does, is have fun. But, nothing is as fun as winning and we got to experience that for the first time in a while.

Even though at halftime of the game we had fallen behind, something felt different. The locker room was fairly quiet as we sat and reflected on the things that we neglected to do well in the first half.

That is that last time our locker room would be quiet on that night.

We stormed out after halftime and squeaked out a win by erasing a 12-point deficit. Some of you may be wondering what could be more fun than simply winning the game?

Our post-game celebration (and not the kind of celebration that some of you are thinking about) was pretty exciting and is something that the 20 of us closely associated with the team will remember more than any of our losses.

With the anticipation of hearing the final buzzer sound, I looked back and saw two of my teammates standing at half court holding hands with huge smiles on their faces. This is a memory that I will never forget.

But, I will spend that rest of my life trying to get a couple of the memories from that night out of my head. One, any time I listen to RESPECT by Aretha Franklin, I will hear the members of the Saluki team screaming it at the top of their lungs and another, some of the members of the team dancing on the benches in our locker room.

But, I must admit that there are some of us, myself included, who are so bad that we shouldn't even have attempted to dance or sing. After listening to R-E-S-P-E-C-T about 6 times and popping open some sparkling cider in celebration, it was finally time to eat. After the game we all went to Mugsy's for some half-price pizza and then home for the rest of our celebration - studying and sleep.

All in all I would say it was a pretty exciting night. Everyone has heard the term "get the ball rolling." We are hoping that is what we did.

We will continue to work hard and pray that the time and energy we put in every day will snowball into eight straight wins. But if that doesn't happen, we will be happy with enough wins to get us into the MVC tournament.

Between now and the conference tournament we still have four home games. We would love it if you could come out and support us.

And thanks to the loyal fans that have been supporting us all year. You all make not so many fans sound like the place is rockin'.

We have home games this weekend, on Friday at 7:05 against Drake and on Sunday at 2:05 against Creighton.

Molly is a senior in recreation. Her views do not necessarily reflect those of the Daily Egyptian.