My Life as a Player IV

In her fourth entry, Nichole describes dealing with a major injury to a teammate.

Entry No. 4 / Feb. 8, 2007

January 18, 2007, was a very sad day for our team. We start practice right after school and, about 45 minutes into to it, we see our post, Stephanie Wilber, walk in on crutches. Everybody is stunned. So coach calls us all into the team room and informs us that she's out for 3-4 weeks due to a stress facture in her foot.

After the talk we knew we had to finish the practice really strong, with everybody going hard and stepping up. We had a big game the next night; it was Round Two with White River High School. Their coach Chris Gibson is awesome and really gets the best out of his players. Stephanie is a senior and will play next year at Arizona State. So with her out, we really were going to play White River with next year’s team. We all felt we had to step up, which we did with a convincing win.

Going into the game people had doubts and weren’t sure if we could get it done without Stephanie. But we proved everybody wrong, and went at White River with full force. My teammate Katie Grad who signed with Washington State came out and really played her butt off. She had an amazing game, delivering a career-high 34 points (KG baby!). Everybody really played hard, giving a 110 percent, and showing a lot of heart, which is Riverside basketball.

Our coach said that was one of our best games because we beat White River by a bigger margin than the first game, and we didn’t have our post. I believe we played a great 32 minutes of Riverside basketball, and that’s exciting for us and our fan base. I hope we play like that all year, and really get after it, because we’re getting closer and closer to where we want to be in March.

---

Click Here for All Diary Entries

---

Nichole Jackson has been a fixture on HoopGurlz.com, as she was a perennial selection to all-tournament teams in youth-basketball events conducted by the website. Last year, Nichole started as a freshman for Auburn Riverside, which advanced to the semifinals of the Washington State 4A tournament. As a sophomore this year, Nichole will run the point for a team expected to be one of the top two in the Washington State 3A classification. A member of the National Honor Society, Nichole hopes to study communications in college and go into broadcasting. Click here to view Nichole's player profile.