North Carolina State University Athletics
Inside the Chalk Box: Sophomore Hannah Fallanca
1/25/2012 12:00:00 AM | Women's Gymnastics
Jan. 25, 2012
Who wouldn’t want to travel all over the country with their closest friends? Lucky for the gymnastics team, we get to do that seven times this year! We just got back from an amazing meet in the windy city of Chicago where we competed against the University of Illinois-Chicago.
The first travel meet is always exciting because it starts off our season of bonding and if we are lucky we get to play hooky from school. When we travel we get to experience each other’s pre-competition rituals, stay in hotels, compete in a different atmosphere and spend every waking second with our friends.
The trip may not have started out great with the seven inches of snow and three hour delay at the airport, but it ended up being a great time. Although we didn’t get to do much outside of the hotel because of the roads and FREEZING weather we still loved the Windy City! We filled our down time by hanging out in each other’s hotel rooms and talking about everything under the sun. Luckily a lot of us are in the same classes or majors so it’s really nice to have people there to help quiz us or understand some hard homework! Even though we are constantly hanging out with each other outside of the gym travel meets gives us the opportunity to bond, because we get to spend a weekend together ‘living’ in virtually the same place. It’s like having all your best friends living right next door!
My favorite part about traveling is experiencing competition in a different atmosphere than we are used to in Reynolds. Some meets are small with few fans and other meets, like this upcoming weekend will have thousands of roaring fans. It gives us an opportunity to show off in front of new crowds every weekend and possibly gain a few extra fans! It also helps us to learn how to create our own enthusiasm without the help of our awesome Wolfpack fans in Reynolds.
It’s hard to believe our third meet is behind us and we are already on our way to Oklahoma. Bring it on, Sooners!
