This last weekend, my team and I went down to the Prescott Courthouse, during a local craft fair, and gave out information cards and put up posters concerning our Dig Pink match to fight breast cancer.  It’s our game at Embry Riddle on October 27 that we play against Yavapai College, and people who come can give donations for the cause or just support those who battling breast cancer.  Everyone will be wearing pink, including the Embry Riddle team and the Yavapai team, and so we needed support from locals and anyone else who would listen to us!  My little sister came with our team to help, since my family was in town.  She fit right in, handing out information to any and all people passing through the fair. 

Here are some pics of my team (compliments of Gina Conley):

I have no idea why the horse was there…. but the team couldn’t pass up posing with it!

And neither could Mahlet….

Kelsey and Ashley are trying to ignore it, with no avail.

Shaw just being Shaw! <3

Cassie and Shaw posing with our poor Laura, who tore her miniscus and had to get surgery. 🙁

After our Dig Pink Awareness activity was through, I drove my family down to Phoenix to have some fun! (minus my mom: she had left early that morning in my family’s car for a convention down there).  It was a blast hanging out with my family!!  After a day filled with shopping and eating, we went to Coolidge to stay with my grandparents.  Overall, it was one of the best weekends that I could’ve asked for! 🙂

The past few weeks have been CRAZY!  No joke.  So I decided to have a weekend off, just for fun, with no homework or worries.  On Saturday, Teri and I, (my awesome roommate), had a girl’s day!  We woke up at eleven that morning, which I had NEVER done before in my entire life.  In ‘N Out was calling our name, so we had breakfast (er, lunch) there.  It was so good!  For anyone who has not been able to go to In ‘N Out, when you came to the west, it is totally worth it!  Although, Teri is from Oregon and she says that there aren’t any of them up there or in Washington, so I suppose that you’ll have to go whenever you visit the SOUTHwest.  Haha.

After our breakfast/lunch, we headed over to Wal-Mart and bought necessities for our dorm.  A dustpan (so we didn’t have to use any more tipped over Eggo boxes!), pop-tarts, grapes, and movies for FIVE BUCKS.  Nice, right?  So we’re pretty much stocked up.

After our little escapade to Wal-Mart, we headed over to the Barnes & Noble at the mall.  For two hours we looked at books, discussing Stephen King, Dan Brown, John Grisham, and other authors.  Only a real friend would sit there reading the covers of books with you for so long!  I love you Teri!

Sunday was a volleyball dedicated day.  After my alarm didn’t go off and Teri woke me up (thanks again), some of my teammates and I went to Glendale to watch the AVP Event, where pro beach volleyball players all gathered from both the USA and Brazil to compete.  It was a hundred and ten degrees, but we knew it was gonna be a good day when we almost hit Kerri Walsh with our car as she was walking on the sidewalk.  Hopefully she didn’t hear five screaming girls as we drove by… that would’ve been embarrassing… haha!

Kerri and Misty May-Treanor didn’t win, but I guess it’s forgivable since it was their first time back together since their pregnancies and Misty’s hurt achilles from Dancing With The Stars.  They could still pretty much pound the ball into the ground.  Straight down.  So jealous.  Anyway, Phil Daulhausser and Todd Rogers on the other hand totally dominated!  They were BEASTS!  The whole time, the crowd for USA went wild!  It was interesting listening to my Brazillian teammate and her family cheering for Brazil, but hey, that’s what made it fun!

We got to meet PHIL DAULHASSER!!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂  Gina was starstruck. (“H-hi Ph-Phil!  I’m Gina!”)  Haha I love you Gina!

So that was pretty much my weekend in a nutshell.  Overall, not bad at all! 🙂

“Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile.”
– Sir Wilfred Grenfell

I never thought that I would say this about a college campus, but it’s strange to look around and actually see PEOPLE!  During preseason, campus was a ghost town, so that’s how I got used to ERAU.  Now campus is teeming with students, walking around with friends at the dorms, catching up on homework in the library, or catching a bite to eat at Chartwell’s.  I love not being one of the only ones here!  Parking was considerably easier two weeks ago when there were no other cars here, but heck, I’d rather have people  and walk a hundred more feet to my car then get a front row spot and be by myself!  So as you can tell, I’m excited by the fact that school started!

My classes are so much fun too!  I’ve only gone to four days of school so far (thanks to my team’s San Diego tournament a couple weeks ago) and I love it.  I am used to having four classes a day from high school, so this whole only-having-school-twice-a-week thing is really working out for me.  The only difference is that in high school I got a lunch break and here I have to shove trail mix in my face in between classes so my stomach won’t die on me.  Somehow I think I’ll live.  I start off my day in the Davis Learning Center with Themes of the Humanities with Professor Malnar.  We discuss pop music, culture, society, and how the Beatles fundamentally changed the way music has evolved.  I love that class because I love oldies music anyway, and it’s just so interesting!  Next I rush to the King Engineering Building for IT 109, Introduction to Computers.  Right now we’re learning how to work Microsoft Word 2007 by making ads and posters with art and borders and different fonts.  I had a class like this in high school, Graphics Communications, so I got finished with my assignment relatively quick.  Next we’re learning about how to use the internet.  🙂  My next class is Principles of Management, where we learn about managing companies, leadership, and the ethics involved therein.  My last class of the day is Intro to Global Securtity and Intelligence.  We are reading a very thought provoking book, Warrior Politics, and I really like it!  I love learning about history and the tendencies of human nature, so this book seems to be the right one for me!

Of course, along with all my classes I still have volleyball, church, making new friends, studying, homework, and TRYING to keep my room clean.  I also joined the Swing Dancing Club, (and we have our first meeting on Thursday!!), and my volleyball team and I are becoming tighter as the season progresses.  I love my girls!

This is my team and I in the beautiful San Diego. 🙂

Our team is finally complete, with Marcella Lachowski as a part of our team.  Our next game is September 15 against Southwestern College at 7 pm, at ERAU.  It’s going to be fun, one, because we have our whole team! and two, because one of my high school teammates is on the Southwestern team!  I’m so excited!  Our team is coming together, and it will be interesting to see what we can do! 

So wish me luck, with volleyball and classes!

Wow!  For the first time in the two and a half weeks I’ve been at Embry Riddle, I have time to get in my jammies and write a blog!  YAY DOWN TIME!!

Since I arrived August 2nd, life has literally been going two hundred miles an hour and I’m just now starting to catch up and breathe again.  Volleyball is CRAZY during preseason, what with multiple practices a day plus hydrotherapy and hiking up mountains at the speed of light.  (My coaches have super long legs.  Which is kind of a disadvantage for us little 5’4″ people, especially in trying to catch up to them.)  I can’t complain though…I have to say with full confidence that I am in the best shape of my life!  It only gets better from here!

When I first arrived, I was scared to death.  I am so thankful for Facebook, because I was at least able to talk to a couple girls on my team before I actually met them.  It was easier to get to know them when they had already given me advice on what to expect from both school and the upcoming season.  I wasn’t as homesick as I would’ve been had I been completely alone.  Of course, it does help when I have one of my friends from high school come with me to be on the same team!  That was definitely a plus.  I soon got to know everyone on the team, and now I know that I shouldn’t have been intimidated at all!  What with six freshman and four returners, I know that we are all pretty much in the same boat with everything.  As for homesickness?  I most certainly still have it.  Even with friends and teammates to help, it still hits pretty hard.  I haven’t ever been away from my family for so long, so I really miss hanging out with them.  My siblings and I are especially close, so it’s hard to be away from them for so long.  They just started their first day of school and I missed it, so I had to talk on the phone for hours to catch up with the latest elementary school, junior high, and high school drama!  That phone bill will be rackin’ up pretty soon…

However, there are plus sides.  During the span of my stay so far, I’ve definitely made a few personal records:

1) I have hiked (more or less sprinted) Thumb Butte, Granite Mountain, and a biking trail which name I can’t recall.  One was super steep, as in forty-five degrees uphill, one was ten miles round-trip, and the last one was all of the above.  Growing up in the White Mountains of Arizona, I knew of all the hiking trails and biking trails and outdoorsy stuff within a twenty-five mile radius, but I never wanted to do any of it.  I consider myself a pretty experienced hiker now.  Not that that means I’m going to go home and hike for FUN, I just sort of know the ropes.  I even have my own camelback and everything. 🙂

These are some of my teammates right after the last hike of preseason!

2)  I learned how to swim!  When I was little, I took swimming lessons.  I never actually paid attention because I was too busy pretending I was Ariel from the Little Mermaid, but I took them anyhow.  My parents tried to save my life, but it was pretty fruitless as far as me saving myself from drowning goes.  HowEVER, for hydrotherapy my team has to swim back and forth across the pool using strokes that I had never executed (or paid any attention to) in my LIFE.  So while everyone was doing the breast stroke, side stroke, back stroke and freestyle swimming, I was trying not to swallow all the water in the pool.  Or drown.  Both pretty much unsuccessfully.  Now, thanks to much concentration and a wonderful teammate who was on her high school swim team, (I love you Cassie!), I can not only save myself from going to the bottom of the pool like a boulder, I can actually (sorta) keep up with the team!  THAT is a feat that I doubted I would ever accomplish!

3)  I cleaned my room.  Enough said.

Cute huh?  Mine is the bunk bed, and my roommate Teri’s is the bottom one. 🙂

So this whole college experience thing is working out just peachy so far.  School starts on Monday, right after my team gets back from Texas (which we have to miss orientation and all the fun stuff for).  There’s something good to be said about having classes only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so Monday will be a recovery day for me.  I am so excited for my classes though!  Which I have to miss the second day of, because we’re going to San Diego on Thursday of next week… but hey!  College is about spontaneity, right?   Get ready, because here comes life!

Tonight is officially the last night of my former, non-college life.

First off, before I get started on the first post I’ve written in a while, my apologies for not being able to write for the past couple of weeks.  My dad and my brother, being the studly men that they are, decided to rent an auger for the day to drill places for the cottonwood trees that will be planted lining my driveway in Pinetop.  Heaven knows why they didn’t hire professional help in doing so, which would’ve saved a lot of heartache over lost internet and telephone lines, but being the typical men that they are they decided that “it couldn’t be that hard!”  I was reminded of Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor from the TV show Home Improvement, always trying to put “more power!” into the dishwasher or another helpless household object, or trying to remodel the upstairs bathroom on his own, which led to a monstrous hole in the wall and a bathtub being lifted to the room through a hefty crane!  The men in my family definitely give Tim Taylor a run for his money!  Well anyway, little did they know that while this spot was the perfect spot for a tree, it was also a very good spot for the telephone line.  That’s not all.  They continued trying to man it out.  They didn’t just hit the line once…they did it twice!!  So, my link to the outside world via internet was cut off, and the past couple of weeks I haven’t been able to blog!  But back to my declaration that tonight is my last night as a non-college student.

Because I’m playing volleyball, I am staying in a hotel in Prescott Valley tonight so that I can check in tomorrow morning with the rest of the Embry Riddle athletes!  I packed up all of my living essentials (which are currently in my car out in the parking lot), said goodbye to family and friends, and took off for the college life!  Well, right behind my mom.  She still had to lead the way to Prescott!  🙂  Some college student I am, I know.  Don’t worry… pretty soon I’ll know this town like the back of my head!  I mean, um, hand!

So bright and early tomorrow morning,  Anna and I will head to ERAU to begin check in and to OFFICIALLY start preseason as Eagles.  This past month I’ve been thinking about what it will be like, and after going to the Take Flight Volleyball Camp for little girls a couple weeks ago, I definitely think that it will be what I hope it will!  So wish me luck!

As much as I want to write about cool summer vacations all over the world to different continents (including Atlantis), discovering a new species of frog in the Amazon rain forest, exploring caves and finding ancient alien robots, or teaching the Aborigine people of Australia to dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, I can’t.  I can’t write about these things because all summer long I’ve been pretty much limited to Pinetop.  And Flagstaff.  Pinetop because it is where my house is (where I’ve been confined to) and Flagstaff because my family and I went to yet another softball tournament (Flagstaff was the host).  So all of you who are expecting some great story about how I went to Africa and somehow cured AIDs, I’m sorry to disappoint.  All I’ve done this summer is play sports, clean my room, and drive my siblings around to wherever they need to go.  I’ll work on it though.

I was basically forced to drive to Flagstaff to get “practice” for college.  By forced, I mean physically shoved into the driver’s seat with the keys thrown at me through the slightly rolled down she’s-gonna-explode-if-I-open-the-door window.  Not that I don’t like driving…I drive all the time.  Just not two and a half hours worth where I can’t look anywhere but the dizzying yellow and white lines on the road in fear that a semi will suddenly tip over and fall on me.  I-40?  Not fun.  Too many big trucks with too little mirrors.  Wow…I’m gonna have conniptions on my trips to and from ERAU!  But back to our trips.  We always arrived just in time to get roast beef sandwiches from Arby’s (which, according to my sister, were the magic keys to winning games.  We had to stop there every day after that.  Which was just fine with me).  We would proceed to drop Lexie (my sis), my dad and my brothers off at the ballfield while my mom and I went to Target or Michael’s or JoAnn, none of which are available in Pinetop.  My mom was like a kid in a candy shop!

In Flagstaff,  Lexie and her team played many games to advance in the bracket while I sat in a lawn chair, with my sunglasses and iPod, watching.  Let me tell you – watching is WAY more difficult emotionally than is playing the game!  When you’re playing, of course it is difficult to have the mindset you need to win and to get the job done, but there is always the option of being able to act, to DO something about how the game is going.  When you’re sitting there, in your lawn chair with your waterbottle in your hand observing, you’re powerless.  And that powerlessness settles in your stomach when something in the game goes wrong, like a big rock just sitting in your gut.  I always teased my mom about having to leave in the middle of my State Championship game due to the pressure, but I never guessed that I would have to do the same thing in my sister’s Little League game!!  Karma, I guess.  Stupid karma. 

While we were in Flagstaff, I was able to meet up with one of my close friends from high school who moved to Flagstaff a few days after graduation so she could get a head start for NAU this fall.  Ever since we took both classes of Sign Language together we’ve been close friends, who would sometimes, in other classes like Math and English, even sign to each other so no one else could see what we were saying!  Only a real friend would talk to you in another language in front of everyone else in the class and not be embarrassed. 🙂 Facebook chatting just wasn’t cutting it, so we got a hold of each other and were able to hang out!  I was so happy to finally see her.  It’s only been a month, but in my opinion that is way too long.  In the dog park next to the softball field, Robin and I watched her dog run around with my eight year old brother and filled each other in with the events that occurred since the summer started.  It was great.  I got to see her house and we went to dinner at Coco’s after the game. 

This is Robin and I in math being baffled at a Rubic’s Cube that one of our friends fixed after five minutes.  After much effort, frustration, yelling at the cube, and a good twenty seconds, we gave up.  Good times. 

Prescott isn’t all that far from Flagstaff, so hopefully there will be many more visits to come. 🙂

“Today was good.  Today was fun.  Tomorrow is another one.” – Dr. Seuss

This week has been crazy!  It seems that since the summer started, I eat, sleep, and breathe volleyball, and I’m loving every minute of it.  This past week, I was able to be one of the coaches at a volleyball camp for little girls with my high school coach Tami Ellsworth.  My little sister was in my group, and I have  to say that it was an eye opener for me.  She is just like me when I was little, right down to the hands.  I had more than one of my teammates who were also helping tell me that she sets just like me!  Soon she’ll be playing seventh grade volleyball, and I’ll be watching her, remembering how thrilling and exciting and nervewracking junior high ball is.  The circle of life is an interesting thing!  The camp itself was a success.  Not only did the girls learn a lot, coaching really helped ME remember some things that I had forgotten.  Soon I’ll be going to ERAU to help with a little girl’s volleyball camp there as well, and I am so excited!

At the end of the week, (Thursday), Anna and I drove down to Thatcher for the Allstar volleyball game.  All of the seniors who got nominated played in the game, the North Allstars against the South Allstars.  Well, Blue Ridge is in the North, so Anna and I walked into the  hotel’s conference room where everyone met and started to embrace our North teammates.  That’s when the North coach notified us that we were being transferred to the South due to lack of players.  So that’s how the North girls got transferred to the “Dirty South” (I didn’t make up the name…our coaches did :-)).  It was kind of ironic, actually.  1.  Coach Ellsworth was one of the people in charge and she was the assistant coach for the North team.  2. We knew someone was going to be transferred and Anna and I were positive that we weren’t going to be the ones.  That proves how karma works its course, I guess.  After about five minutes with our team though we were STOKED that we were playing with the South!  The girls were so much fun and the coaches were AMAZING at volleyball!  These two big guys from florence are the hardest hitters I’ve ever seen in my life!  They were pretty rockin’.

We stayed at the Mariott Springhill Suites in Thatcher, and it was really nice.  The pool was a little on the small side (think glorified jacuzzi without the jets) but everything else was great.  We practiced as a team at Thatcher High School and got to know how the team played as a whole.  Even at dinner we played get-to-know-you games.  After shoving our faces with pizza, we were split up into groups and were given six items.   The girls had to create some kind of commercial for the items.  Our team (the short kids) got second place for creating a commercial for the BUSTOMATIC.  Don’t ask.  There were so many outgoing girls who weren’t afraid to wear, say, fake teeth and a witch’s nose, and it was so hilarious.  We, the short kids, got waterbottles and towels as prizes for our amazing commercial (ha).  Man, if I wasn’t going to Embry Riddle to get my degree in GSIS, I would probably be right up there with Audrey Hepburn, Mickey Rooney and Will Ferrell.  Well, you never know.

Pictured top to bottom left to right: Jessica Queen (JQ), Daniella Serrano (Dani), Ashley McCracken, Anna Martin, Ahsaki LaFrance (Sakie), Stephanie Johnson, and me!  Not pictured: Sabrina Blanco.  We think she was talking on the phone somewhere.

Overall, the entire experience was a BLAST!  A group of girls from all around the southern state became friends and teammates somewhere between practices, accidentally locking our middle hitter out of our room for three hours (oops), and walking to Denny’s where our other middle HAD to get hot wings because it was her tradition to eat them the night before the game.  She also carried around a mini volleyball in her bag for good luck and had to take a shower the night before, that morning, and right before the game, so she would keep to her traditions.  Well, those crazy traditions definitely didn’t fail her!  The South ended up beating the North in three games (we play three out of five) and the bonding during the game was incredible.  Everyone had the same passion for volleyball as I did, and we played like a team that had been together for years.  The feeling was absolutely incredible.  Eight teammates became eight friends.  Go Dirty South!

“Life is partly what we make it and partly what is made by the friends whom we choose.”

-Tehyi Hsieh

Growing up is definitely not on my list of things that I enjoy.

I have, over the years, acquired the disease I quite often refer to as the “Peter Pan Syndrome”.  The “Peter Pan Syndrome”, in accordance to its name,  means that one does not ever want to grow up, or  seldom acts their age.  This illness is not good for the health of just graduated seniors, now freshmen in college, who barely started to work to get money for college, or for freshman who have to go buy towels and sheets and such for their dorm rooms, or for freshman who now have to learn how to make her – er, THEIR, beds.   Of course, it is not good for the health of anyone going to live out by themselves who just barely learned how to separate the whites and colors while doing laundry either.  Gulp.  THIS freshman’s next year is going to be very…interesting.

In my last blog, I posted about going down to the softball state tournament.  Well, here’s a confession… I FORGOT CLOTHES.  Uniform: check.  Toothbrush: check.  Pajamas, workout clothes, sweats and/or clothes to go the restaurant in: uh… not check?  At first I thought I only forgot sweats, so I got some workout clothes from the week before out of my locker and wore those down to Phoenix.  Only to realize that night that I had no pajamas.  Well, being the happy-go-lucky person I am, I wore those sweats to bed.  Only to wake up and realize I had no practice clothes either.  So, I wore those to practice.  And when everyone else changed into fresh clothes to go to eat, I wore those nasty T-shirt and shorts.  I don’t know what I’m going to do without my mom who will drive two hundred miles to bring me fresh, clean smelling clothes.  Shrivel up and die, probably.  Or I might just stink for a while.

These are the infamous pajamas/sweats/practice clothes.

I’m tellin’ ya, this Peter Pan Syndrome is serious stuff.  If you or a loved one is affected by this disease, call 1-800-STY-LTTL.  (Just kidding.  Please don’t call that number.  I have no idea who that poor hapless person is who has to pick up the phone.)

In searching for words of wisdom, I found this very profound, very deep quote by Dave Schroeder that fits this situation:  “I’m not as dumb as I am.”  Nice.  All in all, it seems to be a perfect fit.

Summer.  The word floats through the halls of the high school with a sacred fervor.  Every year, I do the exact same thing.  Towards the end of the semester, I get so stoked thinking about summer, and how I’ll be able to relax and chill, with no homework or school or drama.  And every year, at the beginning of summer, I remember how stupid I was thinking that I’d have ANY free time whatsoever!  What time I gained by not doing homework is time I lost with coaching little girl softball teams, EFY (Especially For Youth), working at my dad’s office as a receptionist, attempting to organize my room that without a doubt looks like a tornado blew through the area, and training for volleyball at ERAU this fall.  So, my plans to scrapbook the past two years, watch a few good movies with my little sibs, and read my favorite books are put on hold for a while.  That’s okay with me.  I love being active, so I can’t complain.  Well, except the activities that involve cleaning.  I can complain about those!

I’ve had an absolutely action packed senior year!  What started with a great volleyball season ended with a great, state-winning softball season, and everything in between makes the year all the better.  I’m still on a high from softball.  We’d never had an especially good  season before this year, but having eight seniors who’d had enough and a new coach with high expectations, we made a goal to win state.  I’ll admit it was a high goal, seeing as Blue Ridge softball didn’t have a banner for winning CONFERENCE let alone STATE, but it was a goal that we worked hard for and we knew we could accomplish.  We’d done it before in Little League, and it was our turn again.  It was a Cinderella story for our team.  We ended up winning conference, the FIRST time in the history of our school, and then went on a couple weeks ago to defeat Winslow in the championship game, 7-3, for the first ever state banner in Blue Ridge softball history.  Go Jackets!  (See?  I told you I was still on a high!)  😉

Even my dad, who in February had a massive stroke in his brain, was healthy enough to go and cheer me on.  Many people die from the kind of stroke my dad went through.  I now see where I get my stubborn, I-will-never-quit nature.  It was from my wonderful dad, who never gave up, who would not accept that he was weakened at all, who refused to actually lean on his walker like he was supposed to.  HE CARRIED IT.  Even on the pavement.  This was very much to the disapproval of my mom, who scolded him like he was one of her kids.  Right away, he’d put it down like a child who’d gotten caught stealing a cookie from the cookie jar.  (Well, at least until she turned around.  Then he’d carry it again!)  Through the dirt and gravel, to my softball tournaments he would go without failure, even though he was weak to the point of collapsing.  Sometimes he would have to sit in the car because his nausea was so miserable, but he still went.  He’s a trooper!  I’m so happy that he was healthy enough to watch his former team, who he’d coached since we were nine, win the state championship for him.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the whole stadium.  He is such an inspiration to me, as well as the rest of my team.  He is doing well, and he even goes to work part time.  What a champ.

So here I am, anxious for the new action-packed chapter of my life to begin, thankfully with my dad right beside me to watch and teach life lessons along the way.

“He didn’t tell me how to live;  he lived, and let me watch him do it.”‘

-Clarence Budington Kelland

Hey there!  My name is Liesl, and yes, it is from the Sound of Music.  Over the years I’ve been called anything from Leslie and Lysol, to “Hey-you-where’s-your-Nazi-boyfriend-Rolph” and “Li…sss…leiseliele?”  So I’m just clarifying.  In English, it’s pronounced lee-sul.  Liesl.   Now that we’ve got that settled, I’ll begin my introduction.

I just recently graduated from Blue Ridge High School in the tiny town of Pinetop/Lakeside, Arizona, a town on the map that could easily be mistaken for a crumb dropped from lunch.  In this tiny mountain tourist hot spot, I grew from toddler to teenager, not ever once going hunting or even catching a single fish.  I try to look at it, not as pathetic like many may think, but as unique and original in the fact that I don’t follow the crowd.  Or it may be a result of my parents’ wise judgment to keep any and all weaponry and sharp objects from me as far away as possible.  That being said, I have attended every softball tournament, volleyball camp, and vice versa that has come to town.  Sometimes we’d even chase them down to the valley to make sure that my summer was as packed with action as it could be.  Athletics?  It runs in the genes.  Outdoorsy activities?  Not so much.  (Note weaponry and sharp objects: above).  Clumsiness also runs through the family.  Thanks, Great-Grandpa Penrod.

The latest excitement to hit my hometown was before-mentioned graduation.  The entire high school gymnasium was filled to the brim with locals wanting to congratulate the Class of 2009.

Graduation was a bittersweet experience.  It was so exciting to finally say that I was officially out of high school and that I was able to make my own choices, but there was also a tinge of sadness that I had to move on, away from a loving family, close friends, amazing coaches, and a close-knit community that all supported me in everything I did.  However, I am just as excited and thrilled for this fall as I am sad about leaving.  So this draws the conclusion that I’m pretty much on an emotional roller coaster, and unsurprisingly, I forgot to buckle my seat belt.

“Life makes the best story.”

Liesl Hall