Week two of the winter semester is underway in the Ferris Volleyball Office.  We are off to a more complete week, but before we get to that I'll take you through a quick peek of week behind us.  In 'A Day in the Life #2' you read about Monday so let's start with Tuesday.
    The day began with conditioning for our girls at 7:00 a.m. with Matt, our strength and conditioning coach.  I arrived at the gym around 8:00 and watched the girls finish up in the gym.  From there it was more recruiting plans and emailing recruits.  
    We're well into vetting our 2011 recruits while simultaneously identifying our 2012 class.  With college recruiting there is a general form of trickle down where the very top Division I programs get the most elite recruits to commit, followed by mid-majors D-I's and then top D-II and smaller D-I's and the trickle continues all the way down the chain.  Some elite volleyball recruits commit as early as their freshman or sophomore year in high school.  Generally at Ferris State we're recruiting juniors who we have been in contact with since their sophomore year.  We have gotten commitments from players all the way from late sophomore year to seniors.  Most of the time we will get commitments from players late in their junior year of high school.
    Enough about recruiting, back to the day...We had one skill session on Tuesday in the afternoon.  It was with our two setters so that was a skill session I was in charge of running.  It was a great first day of skills.  I will say, however, that if you were to ask our setters to describe the session, they might use a slightly different term to describe it.  They worked very hard, to say the least.  
    Wednesday I spent much of the day running errands and working from home.  Once the recruiting season begins, there isn't a weekend that we aren't working one or both days so Wednesday is the day in the week that is left clear of all scheduled appointments for errands and just life in general.  It isn't exactly a day off, just a day to go to the bank, get oil changes, etc..
    On Thursday there was a skill session from 8:30 - 9:30 followed by a huge block of recruiting work before taking some time to plan for the upcoming presentation at the Premier Volleyball Academy Coaching Symposium.  Friday morning was much of the same with the day starting off with a skills session with the middles (which was so fun!), some recruiting work and packing for the trip to Ohio.
    The trip to speak at the symposium officially started at 5:30.  It was supposed to start at 5:00, however, one of the setters ran into a little snag as we were about to leave.  The girls followed me until somewhere in the Lansing area where we dropped Sam's car off so they could take the rest of the trip there in my car.  With their conditioning sessions beginning at 7:00 a.m., the decision was made to only have them drive half the distance.  Paige wasn't in the car more than 5 minutes before she was out for the count so I suppose that was a pretty wise move.  I chatted with Sam about everything under the sun for the rest of the drive ending on the topic of 'Twilight' somehow.  If you aren't familiar with the 'Twilight' movies and books, just trust me when I say the series is wildly popular with today's college students.  Apparently there are two general 'camps' in the world of 'Twilight'.  If you are a female in college today, you are either a part of 'TEAM JACOB or TEAM EDWARD', and you must shout when you say the name of the team - I think it's a rule.  Anyway, I've seen the trailers for the movies and the actors who play these two characters were on the Jay Leno show together once for me to see.  So although I haven't seen them a ton, I've seen enough to not understand why anyone would EVER be on Team Edward.  Jacob is way better looking!  That's all I'm saying here, and you can imagine the conversation as Samantha patiently tried to explain to me why there are some fractions of people on the Team Edward side of things.  This is the conversation Paige awoke to, and needless to say, she was confused as to where in the universe she was at that point.
    So pulling into the hotel after a wrong turn that created the need for a u-turn - it was the navigator's fault - we all piled out of the car to check in. Right away the girls spotted some nice, warm, soft cookies for quests to snack on while they're checking in and immediately grabbed one each.  Very early in the check in process two things became very apparent, #1: we were wound up from being in the car for 3.5 hours and #2: we were thoroughly entertaining to the person attempting to find our reservation.  Another thing became clear as we were working on checking in.....we sure were at the WRONG hotel!    I pointed at the Courtyard Marriot and drove towards the Courtyard Marriot, we did, however, walk into the Country Inn and Suites.  The nice lady behind the counter kindly pointed us in the right direction to the hotel next door and we thanked her for the cookies.  The bummer of it is I was planning on trying one of those cookies on for size after we were done checking in.  I thought it rude to help myself to one after the scene we just brought in!  Nevertheless, it all worked out and from there we got ourselves checked into the correct hotel, grabbed some dinner and went to our rooms to get a good night's sleep.
    The next morning we were scheduled to be the second presentation following the Head Coach from Ohio State.  The girls got themselves warmed up and went over the outline of the presentation.  We had fun presenting the 'out of the box' ideas of the Long Beach State setting style.  The girls buy into it and that was so obvious in the way they worked during the hour.  It was such a pleasure to work with the girls in this environment.
    After the hour, we went to lunch, they departed for Big Rapids and I returned to watch the rest of the presenters and participate in a question and answer session at the end of the day.  The following day, the club also hosted a recruiting showcase which I stayed for.  The weekend ended with my return to Big Rapids at 9:00 p.m. Sunday.
    Look for last week's happenings in the 4th installment of 'A Day in the Life' coming soon....