Senior Rebecca Waters is next up in a year-long softball team blog that will run through the rest of the fall semester and will pick up again for the spring season. The 2009-10 softball team is wrapping up its fall season that has seen its share of  heavy rain. The squad returns all but two starters from last year's team. One of the returning starters is senior Rebecca Waters, who reflects on starting her senior year.

Wow! It's already November and the last fall season of my career. I can't believe how fast it's gone. In some aspects I still feel like a freshmen, now I'm the one that gets asked if an underclassmen has a question. I thought this semester would be pretty relaxed since I don't have class until 11a.m Monday through Thursday, and only one 8 a.m. class on Friday. Boy, was I wrong! It's been one of the busiest semesters ever.

Living off campus makes life a little more hectic. My house is about ten minutes from campus, which doesn't seem like very far, but after having lived in the dorms it sometimes feels like it takes forever to get anywhere softball or school-related. I miss the days of rolling out of bed ten minutes before and just walking down to the weight room, or catching a ride with one of the girls to conditioning. Now I have to get up at 5:45 a.m. to go lift, where before I wouldn't have had to get up until 6:15.

After getting up that early for over ten weeks that extra 30 minutes makes a enormous difference. We had a teammate that was almsot late to weights yesterday, but thankfully someone was able to call and wake her up. That's happened to me before, and I can honestly say that I've never felt so panicked in my life as I did when my teammate called asking where I was.

I'm also doing my early field experience, so I have to get up early on my "mornings off" as well. This means I need 55 hours of observation time at a school before I can do my student teaching. Between weights, practice, class, and my getting my observation hours, it's sometimes hard to find time to buy groceries (a chore that I never faced while living in the dorms, thanks to the cafeteria), or run any errands at all.

Regardless of my crazy schedule, I can't wait for the spring season to get rolling. Thankfully, I have 19 teammates who are like sisters. We all take care of each other, which makes everything go much smoother...especially if I happen to sleep through my alarm on the morning of weights.