2004 AASU Volleyball Trip to China

The Pirates have arrived in China! The team left Savannah early Tuesday morning and, after a two-hour flight to Chicago and a 13-hour flight to Beijing, touched down in China early Wednesday afternoon, thanks to crossing the international date line. The team checked into the Jainguo Garden hotel in downtown Beijing and enjoyed a leisurely evening, including dinner at an entertaining Mongolian restaurant. Live music entertained the part, as two very talented musicians played an instrument that looks like a bass, but only had two strings and the instrument could be plucked or strummed with a bow.

Thursday marked the first full day of sightseeing, and it was quite full! The team visited Tienamen Square, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace before getting an hour of practice in during the afternoon. The morning was rainy, but the weather cleared up nicely in the afternoon. All throughout the day, in both the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, youngsters stopped the AASU players to have their pictures taken with them. Some brave children even struck up conversations with the players, practicing English that is now part of their grade school curriculum.

Sorry about the misidenfication on the month .. as you can tell, some of us are not quite in Asian time yet! Friday started off with an early morning drive out to the Great Wall on the Badaling expressway. 20 members of the AASU travel party started the arduous climb, and nine survived to make it all the way to the top! We ran into other tour groups from the states, including a seniors tennis club playing matches in China, as well as groups from Indiana and Houston. After the Great Wall, we had lunch, then visited the Ming Tombs, where everyone took turns dressing up in period Chinese emporer's and empress' clothing for photo opportunities. This drew quite a crowd among several of the other tourists! The day ended up with a visit to the Sacred Way, a pathway leading to the Ming Tombs that contains several statues of animals, including an elephant that the team couldn't resist another photo opportunity with! Saturday brings our first day of competition with a match beginning at 10:00 a.m. CT on Saturday.

Our first weekend day in Beijing also brought our first match against Beijing University. With a city of 30 million people, automobile (and bicycle) traffic on a Saturday was just as heavy as any rush hour traffic you can see in the U.S. We arrived at Beijing University at 9:00 a.m. and, after a 30-minute warmup, played a five-game match using international rules - which bear a striking resemblance to NCAA volleyball rules! The only major difference is the scoring as games are played to 25 points. The Beijing squad played a typically Chinese brand of volleyball - very hard serves, excellent passing and a lot of quick sets. Beijing took the first four games of the five-game scrimmage, but the Pirates rallied to take the fifth game, 18-16, and improved greatly throughout the course of the match. Senior Darcey Krug led the Pirates with nine kills and hit .316, while Christina Flores, Traci Knuth and Candice Modlinski each had six kills. Jen Michael tallied 30 assists and Flores led defensively with nine digs. Both of the Pirates' freshmen, Stacia McCoy and Amber Stewart, saw their first action in a Pirate uniform and each player had three kills, with McCoy recording six digs. The same two teams will play an afternoon match tomorrow at 3:00 p.m. CT.
After the match, the team enjoyed a rickshaw tour of the Hutong district, a very old housing district in central Beijing. The team visited a family's house in the district, the Li family, who have lived four generations in the same district! After the rickshaw tour, the girls were treated to a trip to Silk Alley, for a little shopping excursion.

Sunday, we found, is a big tourist day not only for foreigners but for Beijing natives as well. This morning, we traveled to the Temple of Heaven. Literally thousands of Beijing natives were there on a beautiful Sunday morning, exercising, playing games such as Dominos, cards and chess (the Chinese version!) and listening to live music. In the temple is the Qinandian, or the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. It is the most photographed building in Beijing - it is also incorporated into the Beijing 2008 Olympic logo and will be the site of the 2008 Olympic opening ceremonies. So, of course, the team had to add to that lore by getting photographed in front of it! After the visit, the team played its second match against Beijing University. This was played under regular match rules, and even though Beijing University won in three straight games, several Pirates played well, including Christina Flores, who had six kills and hit .556. Ashley Lavender had seven digs and Jen Michael had 18 assists and a team-high eight digs. After the match, the two teams got together for photos.
The final event of the day was a traditional Peking Duck dinner in the evening. Ever since the team has arrived in Beijing, most lunches and all of the dinners have been a "all you can eat" affair where the teams sit in a circular table and servers bring out platefuls of food. You rotate the plate around and take as little or as much as you want. Tonight, the "traditional" duck dinner featured many many other dishes, including beef, pork, chicken, fish, shrimp and rice .. all before the duck arrived! It was served as the last course and many of the players had a taste or two of a meat they had never had before.

Our last guided tour of Beijing took us to the Lama temple, or the Lamasery of Harmony and Peace. Practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, the Lamasery consists of several buildings where worshippers come to offer incense and prayer to Buddha. Even on a work day, the temple was full of worshippers. The main sight in this Lamasery is the 28-meter high Buddha statue, carved from a single piece of white sandalwood. The sculpture is eight meters below ground and 18 meters high. Basically, they built the statue first, then built the building around the statue! After lunch, the Pirates played its third match of the trip against the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Aviation. This team captured the collegiate championship for Beijing last year and the girls played five games against two separate teams - the first two games against one team, and then three against a second team. In front of a crowd numbering nearly 40 to 50 students from the University, the Pirates took the first two games, 25-22 and 25-21. Against the second team, the Pirates dropped three games, but both Universities represented themselves very well in an entertaining scrimmage. Darcey Krug led the Pirates with 14 kills, while Traci Knuth added 10 kills and 12 digs. Jen Michael tallied 36 assists to go along with 10 digs, and Candice Modlinski recorded five blocks. Tuesday marks the team's final full day in Beijing and we depart for Shanghai on Wednesday morning.

Tuesday was a "free day" to explore Beijing before our departure for Shanghai tomorrow morning. Some traveled back to Tienemen Square and the Forbidden City for a more indepth guided tour, while some took the opportunity to return to Silk Alley for more shopping and bargains. A couple of the party even took in a movie at the cinema closest to the hotel! Today's pictures, therefore, are a collection of shots from the past six days and we will return with an update tomorrow night after the team arrives in Shanghai. The flight to Shanghai leaves around Noon and should touch down just around 2 p.m. CT.

The traveling party arrived in Shanghai, no worse for wear, though a bit of turbulence heading into Shanghai on our China Air flight gave a few of the players a little jolt. Shanghai's Pudong airport is exquisitely modern, built just four years ago in the year 2000. We took a charter bus into downtown to our hotel, the Holiday Inn Plaza, but when we leave on Monday, we will be taking the Maglev train that zips you from downtown to the airport in eight minutes. Our charter bus ride was just under an hour! Temperatures were around 35 degrees celsius and overcast, thanks to a few clouds and smog. We might be getting a few rain showers tomorrow.
With most of the day taken up by traveling, dinner was an early affair at the Sunjoy restaurant in downtown Shanghai. Afterwards, a few of the players and parents took in a little live music at one of the fountains nearby. Unfortunately, Shanghai is in the middle of a bit of an energy crunch. Downtown would normally be lit brightly, but energy restrictions have forced most companies not to light the outer lights of its buildings at night to save energy, thus an interesting nightlife where the city streets are lit, but two stories up it is almost pitch dark because of the lack of building lights.

Our first full day in Shanghai turned out to be quite full indeed! A morning trip to the Shanghai Museum and the People's Square fascinated everyone with the exhibits in Chinese coins, calligraphy, art, furniture, sculpture and silk. And from ancient to modern, we then took a trip to the top of the Shanghai TV Tower, Asia's tallest free standing structure and the third tallest tower in the world! The sight from near the top of the tower, 360 meters high, dwarfed the high rise buildings surrounding it. After lunch, the team then took a trip to the Bund, a riverfront section in downtown Shanghai noted for its wonderful scenery and fun-loving vendors, as the pictures prove! Dinner was preceded by a tour of a real Chinese silk factory, where the girls got a chance to see how silk is harvested and pulled to make many items, then just -had- to pick up a few of these items in the factory's store. Tomorrow morning will be the first match in Shanghai, against a club team called the Shanghai Youth Volleyball Club.

Early Friday morning, we took an hour-long bus ride out to the suburbs of Shanghai, where the U17 Shanghai Youth volleyball club lives and trains. The complex is huge - it is probably as close to the Disney's Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando as you're going to get. There was a natatorium, several other sports fields and venues, as well as a volleyball-only facility, in which we played. The Shanghai Youth club consists of a mixture of 15-, 16- and 17-year old students. These students literally eat, sleep and drink volleyball and they only get to go home every other weekend to be with their families. They train along an Olympic developmental squad from Shanghai - this team consists of high caliber players, including the very last cut from the Chinese olympic squad of 12 that departed for Athens last week. The Pirates scrimmaged against the Shanghai Youth for five games. Christina Flores led offensively with eight kills, while Darcey Krug added seven. Freshman Stacia McCoy hit an impressive .444 off the bench and also added six digs. Tomorrow, the Pirates will play their final match in China against the same team at 10:00 a.m. CT.
After a rest at the hotel, the team ventured out to the Yu Yuan Gardens in downtown Shanghai. an enclosed garden originally laid out in the 1500s by a wealthy businessman. The gardens cover more than 20,000 square meters and contain, along with plants, a few fish streams, man-made rock formations and temple rooms. After the gardens, a visit to the adjacent Yu Yuan market where a very popular dumpling restaurant exists - the cooks draw quite the audience by just preparing these delicacies, and the line to buy is 10 meters long. More stores, both government-run and independent, dominate the market, and more good bargains were found by all!

Our final match of the trip saw the Pirates play the Shanghai Youth U17 club for a second time, and that made a difference as the Pirates played very well in their "swan song" in China. Christina Flores (9 kills, 18 digs) led the way, while Ashley Lavender added eight kills and Darcey Krug had seven kills and three blocks. Freshman Stacia McCoy added five kills and 11 digs off the bench, and after the match, head coach Alan Segal and Shanghai Youth head coach Dr. Liu - a former member of the Chinese Olympic Men's Volleyball Team - posed for a picture as Dr. Liu presented the Pirates a signed volleyball from the Shanghai Youth squad. The team even followed the girls out to the bus to give them a farewell wave as we drove away from the facility!
Then it was off to lunch, where the team celebrated a birthday as Flores turned 19 years old, complete with a cake and a song. The afternoon touring took the Pirates to the Jade Buddha Temple, home of one of two Jade Buddha figurines delivered to China and housed in a temple. It is a functioning temple, with dining halls, incense burners and prayer areas for people to come and worship Buddha. The team then enjoyed a tea ceremony afterwards. Sunday is our final full day in China, and the team is going to take a train ride to Suzhou in the morning and visit that city, often called the "Venice" of China.

The final full day in China for the Pirates ! The day included a morning train trip to Suzhou. Sunday is a family day in China, with many people traveling the train to and from Shanghai to visit parents or children. Also, train tickets in China are sold on a one-way basis only. When we arrived in Suzhou at 10:00 a.m., we tried to get return tickets to Shanghai for that afternoon only to find that tickets were sold out! We were able to hire a tour bus and van, however, and see some of the sights of Suzhou and still get a ride back to Shanghai. We visited the city gates of Suzhou, which included the Flower Pavilion, a gondola ride through one of the streams and a tea ceremony. Afterwards, the team visited another silk store and an arts and crafts store, where several beautiful works such as embroidery, sandalwood carving and painting were on display. The 85-km ride back to Shanghai took about an hour and a few of the party took one last shopping trip to one of the Shanghai markets! Monday morning, the Pirates depart from Shanghai on a Noon flight and, thanks to the date line, will return to the States on the same day. A look at today's photos: (Archived photos will stay on the page, just look below the day's photos)

#	Name	Ht.	Cl.	Pos.	Hometown/School
1	Lauren Good	6-0	Soph.	MH/RS	Richmond, Va. / Mills E. Godwin HS
2	Amber Stewart	5-9	Fr.	OH	Savannah, Ga. / Savannah Christian
3	Candice Modlinski	6-0	Sr.	MH/OH	St. Charles, Ill. / St. Charles East HS
6	Jen Michael	5-6	Grad.	S	Canal Fulton, Ohio / Francis Marion
8	Ashley Lavender	5-10	Sr.	OH	Leawood, Kan. / Blue Valley HS
9	Stacia McCoy	5-10	Fr.	OH	Eagan, Minn. / Eastview HS
10	Darcey Krug	6-0	Sr.	RS	Owings, Md. / Northern HS
11	Traci Knuth	5-11	Soph.	MH	Columbus, Neb. / Columbus HS
13	Christina Flores	5-10	Soph.	OH	Addison, Ill. / Addison HS

Head Coach: Alan Segal
Assistant Coach: Jen Michael
Dir. of Sports Communications: Chad Jackson
Team Physician: Dr. Spencer Wheeler
Strength & Conditioning Coach: Henry Myers


On the train from Shanghai to Suzhou - Karl and Ashley Lavender (front), Stacia McCoy and Traci Knuth (back)	The gondolas in the City Gate attraction in Suzhou

A taste of home in China - the team lunches at the Golden Arches	The team marvels at some fine works of art in an arts and crafts museum in Suzhou

2004 AASU Volleyball China Trip