Badger Chronicles: volume one
December 17, 2008 | Men's Basketball
Sophomore Brett Valentyn is in his third year with the Wisconsin basketball program. A native of nearby Verona, Wis., Brett walked on to the Badgers in 2006 and spent his freshman year as a redshirt. A 2008 Academic All-Big Ten honoree, Brett is no doubt a valuable piece of the 2008-09 team.
Throughout this season, Brett will be writing a semi-regular column for the Badger Gameday program that will give fans a unique look at the Wisconsin team. This entry originally ran in the game program against SIU-Edwardsville.
Greetings Badger fans! This is Brett Valentyn checking in, as I will be throughout the year, to give you updates on our season, perspective on what life as a Badger is like and any other potentially interesting information I can send your way. In this first segment, I 'll give you all a chance to get caught up on our season at this point and give you an idea of the preparation we've gone through to get ourselves ready for the season ahead.
This past summer, while most kids our age head to their respective homes to get summer jobs or just celebrate three months with no classes, we stay here in Madison on campus and focus on improving our strength and agility. Our strength and conditioning coach Scott Hettenbach puts us through tough weight lifting sessions throughout the summer weeks. The weight lifting is vigorous, but we all understand it's necessary at this level and is essential to our success on the court. It's pretty remarkable looking at our progression from the beginning of the summer to the end of the summer in terms of how much weight we are lifting. Every year, it seems the freshmen classes tend to check their muscles out in the mirror in our locker room more and more as the summer progresses.
Also during the summer, we stay busy taking summer classes. During the year, with practices and games consuming a fair amount of time, it's tough to take a monstrous amount of credits, so taking summer classes lightens the course load during the year and helps us to graduate on time. During the summer, we also help out at the Wisconsin Basketball Camps and try to teach kids the fundamentals of the game.
In the fall, we go through our preseason conditioning, which includes plyometric workouts and the legendary, dreaded running of the Elver Park hill. The hill has gotten its fair share of publicity over the years, and rightfully so. Throughout the preseason, we go to the hill twice a week and add on to the number of times we run up the hill each week. It 's hard to describe the rigor of running the hill until you've actually done it, but let's just say we're happier leaving Elver Park than we are arriving. On the last day of the hill, after running up the hill 21 times as we did this year, with limited time recovery in between each repetition, there's a great feeling of accomplishment, pride and team unity in the fact that we all finished together and made it through another year of running the hill. It's a tough mental and physical challenge, but I'm pleased to report we all survived the hill this year, and we're a stronger team because of it.
At this point in our season, we've had a few weeks of practice, improving our fundamentals and getting better everyday. Before our first regular season game, we 've had a chance to play against somebody other than ourselves in exhibition wins over Augustana and UW-Whitewater. In our long-awaited regular season opener, we got a hard-fought win against a talented Long Beach State team. Next up is SIU-Edwardsville, and we're excited for another challenge in front of another great Kohl Center crowd. On Wisconsin!
