Pre-Season Isn't Completely Behind Closed Doors - Sunday Cardinal Couple

Pre-Season Sometimes Peeks Out

(A quick note from your scribe today to thank the Cardinal Couple crew for covering the past couple of Sundays while I was on a much-needed vacation.  I'm back and refreshed and more ready than ever to get this athletic season started.   --  Jeff)

All three of Fall sports teams that we closely follow here at Cardinal Couple are in the thick of pre-season practices now, Field Hockey, Soccer, and Volleyball are all getting after it.

Mostly pre-season practices are private and fans don't have access, but occasionally the action peeks out a bit.

Field Hockey may be the easiest to glimpse, just based on the structure of Trager Stadium where the team practices and plays.  We're not necessarily encouraging people to go watch, but the playing surface at Trager is visible from a number of spots outside of the stadium facility, so seeing the team in practice happens if you're passing by the stadium while the practices are going on.

Soccer, of course, is also an outdoor sport with an outdoor facility, but the structure of Lynn Stadium on campus does generally prevent seeing the playing surface from outside of the facility with just glimpses through the gates possible.

Volleyball is the indoor sport of the Fall, and their practice and playing facility doesn't have any visibility from outside, but the team absolutely loves playing beach volleyball in addition to their normal indoor form, and the coaching staff does usually indulge them in that during pre-season practice.

This year, Volleyball took to J-Town Beach to play yesterday.  Details are extremely scarce, but apparently they formed smaller teams and played in some sort of tournament form.  The event was also held in support of the Lesley & Rhyan Prather Foundation.

Lesley and Rhyan Prather were, you may remember, the mother and daughter killed in a car wreck on I-70 near St. Charles Missouri on the way to a club volleyball tournament in Kansas City.  Lesley Prather played collegiate volleyball at UofL as Lesley Drury, and was the sister of UofL Volleyball Director of Ops Sarah (Drury) Petkovic.  Also killed in the car wreck were Carrie McCaw and her daughter Kacey.  McCaw played collegiate volleyball at Syracuse.

The Lesley and Rhyan Prather Foundation was created to help women, children, and families deal with tragedies such as car wrecks, pediatric or adult illnesses, and fires.  The foundation's web presence can be found at lrpfd.com.

Cardinal Couple Radio Hour Podcast

A quartet showed up for the CCRHP yesterday, though we didn't try to pull off any singing numbers, I for one was sporting a voice for photography as I'm continuing to try to overcome and recover from a bit of a bug I picked up during my vacation somewhere in the North Atlantic.

The gang rejoiced that there were actual games on the schedule for the week with Soccer kicking off the official season on Thursday vs Indiana State.  Field Hockey scrimmaging  Bellarmine and Volleyball having their Red vs. Black  scrimmages on Friday and Saturday.

We then touched on a bit of news from the week, and then gave some predictions for regular season records.

Check out the podcast at it's home:  https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cardinal-couple/episodes/Summer-Slump-Winds-Down-e27gv5k

-- 

JMcA