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December 17, 2008 | Women's Basketball
Every home game, sophomores athid=6409&deptid=135"> --> Alyssa Karel and athid=6410&deptid=135"> --> Tara Steinbauer give Badger fans an inside look into the Wisconsin women's basketball team with their 'CDW Badger Chronicles' log that are available in the game programs. Today Steinbauer talks about the preseason training the Badgers did with new strength and conditioning coach Ray Eady. Everything from stretching to metabolic sprints to skipping' Read on to find out.
Hello Badger Fans!
Today I will be giving you the inside perspective on our preseason training.
Our new strength coach, Ray Eady, has been a great addition to our team. Even though none of the players, including myself, were big fans of the 6 a.m. conditioning workouts he implemented, we can certainly see the payoffs.
A typical morning for us would consist of meeting in the Nicholas Johnson Pavilion a little before 6 a.m. After foam rolling and stretching, Ray would promptly line us up along the sideline to begin our series of skips.
Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking 'Skips' This is basketball! There's no skipping involved! ' Well it turns out skipping is actually quite beneficial as a cardio warm-up. Following our skipping routine, we then proceeded to a variety of other exercises ranging from tennis ball throws, to defensive slides, to closeout drills.
After all of this, which may seem like a total workout to some of you (It sure did to us!), Ray had us hooked up to the heart monitor machines while running 'metabolic sprints.' For those of you who aren't familiar with metabolic sprints, they're about as bad as they sound. Basically, for four different sets consisting of about six minutes each, we would touch various lines on the court until we reached our target heart rate zone. Needless to say we worked up a very sufficient sweat'maybe even comparable to the type of sweat Alana Trotter works up everyday in practice! If you know Alana at all, she is virtually dripping wet after each practice. We love that hard work, Alana! Keep it up!
This routine occurred every Tuesday and Thursday morning for six weeks of pre-season and I think I can vouch for everyone when I say that we 've definitely seen improvements.
Another great thing about Ray is his motivational technique and the way he is always pushing us to be our best. It's not news to any of you Badger fans that this year our team wants to go places it's never gone before. Ray is helping to make this possible by constantly reminding us of what it takes to get there. He fills us with motivational stories of personal experiences and has even taught us the art of 'shadow boxing' in order to pump us up for practices or games. So far, he has done a tremendous job preparing us for the season and we all look forward to an intense year under his guidance and care.
Another exciting part about preseason, aside from getting to work out with Ray, has been getting all of our new gear. It's like Christmas in October!
Gary, our wonderful equipment room supervisor, does a fabulous job of organizing all of our shoes, clothes, sweat suits and jerseys to make sure we're always well outfitted and ready for any occasion, whether it be traveling or playing.
This year we got a ton of great stuff. Here's a list of everything we received: three pairs of non-basketball shoes, practice gear, spandex, sport bras, socks, two types of basketball shoes, three Wisconsin-issued basketball t-shirts, gray sweat pants, gray sweatshirt, travel suits, one red long sleeve dry-fit shirt, one white long sleeve dry-fit shirt and most importantly, our 2008 '09 Wisconsin Basketball jerseys. A big huge thanks to Gary for everything he does, you make us look like a dapper bunch! Another huge thanks to our coaching staff for their generosity and great taste!
There you have it folks! Another inside look at all the wonderful aspects of women's basketball at Wisconsin. It will undoubtedly be a great season for us, full of new experiences and many successes.
We sincerely hope you continue to join us on our journey! Thanks for reading, and On, Wisconsin!
#4 Tara Steinbauer
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