I just got back from LA for a recruiting trip and to tie up some loose ends with signees. I had an amazing trip, loved meeting families, and watching games at the HAX hosted by Elbert Kinnebrews of the LA Sparks. It was a great tourney with a lot of talented players and extremely nice and hospitable people. I especially took advantage of the delicious food in the coaches room. Later on, I met up with Coach Day and we had lunch with a few recruits. Day was a trooper knee surgery and all, and allowed my best friends god daughter Reshanda aka "Too Tall" to push her around in a baby stroller. Go DAY DAY!

I also had an awesome time on the "haunted" Queen Mary with a couple great kids that we are really excited about. Kiana Furlow and Stephanie Lopez. Keep your fingers crossed T'Wolves, this season could go down in the record books!

Haiti Relief Efforts from BMCC!! Proud to be in the pack!!

http://nwaacc.org/index.php?id=1384&cat=0

Thank You...

First of all we would like to wish everybody a healthy and happy new year. It is crazy to think that we are already in January of our season. We want to dedicate this particular blog as a thank you to all of those kind people who helped us in some way this year. The first Thank You goes out to Cheryl from the bus driver company who we go through. From last season and this season we have not been fortunate enough to have an outstanding bus driver, until we luckily got Cheryl. She was always on time, always had a smile on her face, and just was very good at making her job the "Big Time". This is the book we read while on our trip to Roseburg (the longest road trip ever!) which is why we are so thankful to have had Cheryl as our bus driver that weekend. We only wish we could have had her for each of our trips! We love you Cheryl!!!

Second Thank You goes out to DG Gifts for generously making us some awesome new Blue Mountain Timberwolf gear! They made us decals for our newly remodeled locker room. (Which helps us get hyped before the game)They also made us four different types of shirts and worked diligently to ensure the shirts were made perfectly. Dave at DG exemplifies the word passion in what he does and we are so very lucky to have him here locally.

Coach said, as she pulled them out of the box, " Now I never wanna see any of your high school stuff again, no Deary Idaho, no Enterprise." and then looked at me with a bad taste in her mouth, " and especially no more Inchelium!" HAHA... We beat her team each time we met in high school ;) So ever since we got these shirts, that's all you see us wear. And really that's all we want to wear because they are so nice. Everybody who sees us loves them and some people are already hassling me to hurry up and buy one for them. Coach made sure to order a lot so we could buy them and give to our loved ones as a late Xmas gift. So again DG Gifts, we can't thank you enough for making us these awesome shirts!

Below is the shirts DG Gifts made for us and also the custom stickers they designed for our lockerroom.

BMCC Charity Work

This years BMCC team have done a number of things to better our community. The first thing the women's BB team did was trick or treat for canned goods. The girls braved the freezing cold dressed in a number of unique and fun costumes. When the trunk of my car was finally packed to the top we called it a night. The next morning we headed to the food bank to drop off over 200 pounds of food to needy people. Thanks to BMCC Girls Basketball and the people who donated graciously.

I love Pajamas!!!

And Dixie Chicks lol!

Coach Day

Check out the blog about Coach Day all the way from LA.

Umpqua Crossover

This last weekend our team was fortunate enough to travel to Roseburg Oregon for their Crossover tournament. During the 7+ hour trip, we took turns reading from a favorite book of mine entitled "Making the Big time Where You Are" by Frosty Westering. I was impressed at how much this book touched our team. Everyone really absorbed and learned so much about each other and themselves. It truly changed our perception of what the Big Time really is.

The following day we got up early had waffles for breakfast and took off for our shoot around. I informed the girls to wear something warm as Cheryl drove us to our next destination. The Umpqua Safari!!! As a early Christmas Gift we took the girls on quite an expedition. It was a wild life refuge for endangered animals. We saw so many cool animals, many of them were free to roam their designated area "Africa, Asia and the Americas." We saw Lions, Monkeys, Bears, Giraffs, Zebras, Cheetahs, the list goes on and on. My least favorite of the animals were the Yaks and the Crazy Emu that chased us from Africa to Asia and all the way to the Americas. He literally was pecking the glass, I think he wanted to watch our game vs the Umpqua All-Star team later that night. Which was absolutely fantastic.

We had the opportunity to test our skills versus a very good alumni team consisting of Division 1 talent and players who were stars in other 4 year programs. We got down by as many as 14 points with 6 minutes to go. We through on a press and ended up coming back to win the game by 2 points. It was a lot of fun and inspiring to see how well the Umpqua girls had stayed in great shape and continue to play the game that they obviously love so much.

The next day we played the regular Umpqua team. They are an extremely fast and energetic team that applies pressure defense at every inch of the floor. This was the second time we played them and unfortunately they have accounted for 2 of our 3 losses this season. However, I felt that we improved a ton since playing them in November, it was a good gauge for our team.

On Sunday we played Highline for 3rd place in the Crossover. Highline made the NWAACC tournament last year and they always have a competitive team and program. Not to mention after watching them play we felt that the two teams were extremely even on talent. We reminded the girls numerous times how the team with the most heart would win the game. We told them "It is gonna come down to who wants it more." We found ourselves down by 4 with 50 seconds to go, when Chelsi Pakootas managed a steal and Jenny Beamer converted a lay up to bring us with in 2 with 22 seconds to go. Highline brought the ball across half court and called a timeout to draw up a play. On the inbounds pass, Chelsi dove on a loose ball and tied it up. Fortunately, the possession arrow was in our favor and we brought the ball across the floor and called a timeout. They gave us the ball underneath, and we drew up a last minute inbounds play, Chelsi got the pass from Heather Arnone and converted on a floater in the middle of the key to tie it up and send us to overtime. We ended up winning the game by four in OT, it was a fantastic game and the icing on the cake was that Chelsi was put on the all tournament team.