Julie Forster Blog Spot #1: Arriving in Denmark
COPENHAGEN – Former Great Dane Julie Forster is in Denmark, getting ready for her first professional season with Stevnsgade BBK. She is keeping track of her season with a blog, and she checks in with UAlbany about how things are going before the season gets underway:
“I arrived in Copenhagen two weeks ago. Sarah Eichler (Green Bay ’13) and I were greeted at the airport by our coach, team manager and a few of our new teammates. We were then taken to see our playing gym and move into our apartment. It was a really fun day, but the hardest thing was staying awake. We arrived at 10 a.m. local time, but it was really 4 a.m. Eastern Time for me. In the subsequent days, we were taken on a tour of Copenhagen, applied for our working visas and also, thankfully, got to sleep off the jet lag.
One of the biggest differences here is transportation. Gas is really expensive (about nine dollars a gallon!), so most people use public transportation or bike. I’ve traveled mostly by bus but I just got my bike recently and am excited to put it to use. Another difference is that they use the metric system. You buy milk in liters, say your weight in kilograms, etc. You can imagine my surprise at the weight room when I grabbed a set of “light” weights to warm up and found myself struggling to complete my reps.
The team practices four times a week and I have morning workouts three times a week with Sarah. My teammates here are all really nice. A lot of them are actually around my age, so it is easy to relate to them. Many of them are current students at Copenhagen University. In Denmark, there are no college sports teams so students play competitively in club leagues. Interestingly, college is free in Denmark and students actually get a $ 1000 stipend every month from the government while studying.
In addition to workouts, Sarah and I are also coaching two young girls teams this year. We had our first practice this week and it looks like I’m going to have to learn Danish quickly! Almost all adults in Denmark speak English, but the girls we coach are too young to have learned it. We had to spend a majority of practice coaching through visual examples. One of the parents was nice enough to create a cheat sheet of Danish basketball terms for us, and I plan to study those before practice next week.
Our first contest is this Sunday in Sweden. I look forward to seeing another country and also to start off our season.”
