My experience here has been a life-changing one. I have learned so much about my opponents, my team, my coaches, my family, and most of all - myself. I have been a co-captain on this team since June 2007 and in May 2008, I was chosen to be a solo captain. The Paralympics is my first official tournament holding this title. Talk about pressure. I have been doing my best to be a good leader and to be a force for my team. Leadership goes far beyond the white lines of the court, however, much has to be done inside those lines as well. Personally, I feel I have struggled during matches to be the leader my team needs me to be in scoring. This is what I intend to be focused on during our next three matches. I felt that yesterday I had done much better than the first match against Lithuania.

Yesterday, Team USA had a difficult loss against China. It's hard to say that it was a bad loss because we learned so much from that match that will help us if we face China in the Gold Medal Match. In the first set, we started out really slow posting only 14 total points to China's 25. We had a lot of unforced errors and I believe that it was mostly nerves. We played with an unbelievable crowd that was not only cheering for China, but also for us. The second set we started out a little slow making some more errors that gave the Chinese a lead, but it wasn't over. Team USA was right there with them. Personally, sitting on the court during this game, I thought we were going to win. We started playing our game, but the only thing that we lacked was executing the game plan the coaching staff had given us. The same was with the third set.

Today we have Latvia which should be a fairly easy match for us, but we are not looking past them. We have shunned all thoughts about the medal rounds because without a win today, there is no medal rounds. We are focused and plan on making a statement today that we deserve to be in medal contention. If we win today, more than likely, we will face the Netherlands on the 12th (Friday).