Lady Archer basketball team prepares for season, away from home
-Staff Writer-
With the large majority of the new-look STLCC Archer women’s basketball team attending classes at Meramec, and head coach Shelly Ethridge still maintaining her office and P.E. classes at Meramec, the Archer’s have had to deal with a new adversity that Meramec basketball players have never had to deal with—traveling from classes at Meramec to the home court at STLCC-Forest Park.
Lauren Fischer, a freshman guard for the Archers, attends Meramec. As a senior for the Rockwood Summit Falcons last season, 5’10” forward Fischer single-handedly scored nearly 25 percent of her team’s points all season. Scoring 204 points all year, Fisher averaged 9.3 points per game. The other 12 Falcon players combined for 649 points all season. All the while, Fischer maintained a 3.5 GPA.
In October, the lady Archer basketball team will be running their program strictly at STLCC-Forest Park’s campus. This time Fischer will be forced to find her niche in the college game, balancing school, work and the game she has played since the third grade.
“The college standards are greater and the mindset is different,” Fischer said. “The focus of college basketball is more about winning, rather than just the experience itself.”
While juggling 15 hours of practice per week, Fischer has to plan out an average of three hours a night for homework, while also losing hours at work from an average of 20 hours a week to less than eight hours.
“I can only work one day a week…my paychecks are tiny,” Fischer said.
When the season starts in early November, those players who attend Meramec, along with head coach Shelly Ethridge and assistant coach Melanie Marcy, will have to leave Meramec and travel to the Forest Park campus every day for practice, home games and catching the bus to travel. The Forest Park campus, a 25-minute commute from Meramec, will be opened on Nov. 1 as the new home of the STLCC basketball teams, when the lady Archers will play junior varsity McKendree University team as an exhibition game at 5:30 p.m.
“When the season actually starts, I will have no time for a social life…[the Archers] will have to eat, sleep and breathe basketball,” Fischer said.
While adjusting to a new atmosphere surrounded by time management and a non-stop schedule of class, practice and homework, Fisher finds herself on the constant-motion mentality.
“Time management is definitely an order,” Fischer said. “I map it out. I probably have three calendars—phone, refrigerator, planner… I have to have something on me all the time. I plan out practice times, weight lifting times… Everything is very time oriented. I have a lot of late nights—a lot of caffeine.”
Fischer, along with the rest of the Archer community, is hopeful that the late nights pay off.
“We plan on going all the way to nationals,” Fischer said. “Anything else is unacceptable.”
