Meet Me at the Moxie

There’s always an imposing sense of nostalgia this time of year when school is about to start. I always loved going back to school and though the countdown to summer usually began about two weeks later, it was always exciting. Over the years, brand new Lisa Frank cardboard pencil boxes became new Doc Martens that weighed 10 pounds each, which became a new hot pink Jansport backpack (until you realized every other girl in school had the same one), which became a plane ticket back to the east coast, which became another brand new pair of Nike shoes and stark white kneepads that didn’t smell like someone had died in them, which became your last opportunity to bring your freshman year 2.5 GPA up two points even if you got a 4.0 on the semester and bought shots of Patron for your professor every Monday at lunch.

College students across the country know exactly what I’m talking about. Every class started out with its own designated spiral notebook, filled with blank pages and the very best of intentions. Come December you had either misplaced said notebooks, transformed them into coasters for pitchers of Natty Light, filled them with to-do lists that really only served the purpose of appearing organized to God or sold them to naïve freshmen who actually believed you had been to class more than twice since August.

Spring syllabus week was my favorite. The parties were raging and assuming we didn’t shit ourselves on national TV in the last match of the fall season, we usually had a couple weeks to be normal students. It also helped that it was 9 degrees outside on a warm day and you could blame newly added holiday/beer girth on the fact that you were wearing three pairs of sweatpants. Sometimes if you hadn’t done laundry since first semester you could get away with wearing sweats that belonged to someone on the men’s wrestling or soccer teams without too much outside inquisition. Sometimes.

Fall was a slightly different story, which is the main reason I even thought of writing about this. My heart goes out right now to the girls in South Gym who are no doubt sweating their balls off, covered in blood and getting kicked in the face by volleyballs. Preseason. The beauty and beast of Penn State volleyball.

The third day of my freshman preseason I contemplated quitting and hitch-hiking back to Colorado with all my beautiful, empty notebooks. It’s funny now, especially considering that I would give anything to be in South Gym, even on Tuesdays (defense day…yeah girls, I said it), but that day…that day it was NOT funny. Coach and I sat on the back of an empty truck that transported the football team’s dirty laundry to and from their dirty bodies and he convinced me that I should probably just stop being a baby. He was smoking a cigar and I was almost in tears. Not his first rodeo. To make matters worse, he had ordered spandex with a SEVEN inch inseam that ran a couple sizes small and the leg seams were cutting off my circulation. I had four butt cheeks. Luckily some of the quadzilla seniors who had been leg-pressing army tanks already for three years eventually donated some used lycra to the Cassy’s Ass is BIG Foundation.

It didn’t take long for me to snap out of my preseason crisis. Right about the time I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to feel my legs for a few weeks and that really…seriously…in all seriousness…there was a good chance I wouldn’t LITERALLY die, I sacked up and made friends with my new life. The best part about preseason - other than the end of it – is this unexpected crossroads in the middle where you lose your mind. Everything is funny…really funny. You have been with the same group of people non-stop for however many days and in that time you have experienced the full gamut of human emotion. It has poured rain. It has been 100 degrees with 7,000% humidity. Coach has made you puke and he has made you laugh. You have had the worst practice of your life and followed it with the best. You have choked on Gatorade and joked about playing power hour with Pedialyte at night. You actually have played power hour with Pedialyte…multiple times. You have slept on the locker room floor using socks as a pillow. You have listened to the previous year’s warm-up tape a total of 918 times and changed the lyrics of every song to fit the mood of the day. Every person on the team has acquired at least two solid and potentially lifelong nicknames. You have stood alone in the middle of main gym at Rec Hall and felt blessed. You have tried every possible ice cream + topping combination at the dining hall. You have iced every part of your body except your eyeballs. You have asked yourself if it was over yet and at some point, you start hoping it never ends.

Now I’m sitting in an office on the other side of the country in California…detached. It’s funny to think about the past and know that someone else is living it at the very same time you miss it. Special. There’s a bunch of girls laughing over dinner in a Penn State dining hall right now with racing minds, sore bodies and a lot to look forward to. Like tonight’s practice…probably the third of the day. And then bed. And then tomorrow…and that’s how it goes, one day at a time.

Good luck this season girls…don’t forget to go for every ball with two hands. And try to remember…everything.