Julie Forster Blog Spot #2: Starting the Season, Seeing the Sights

COPENHAGEN – Former Great Dane standout Julie Forster is playing for Stevnsgade BBK in Denmark in her first professional season.  She is keeping track of her time overseas with a blog, and she checks in with UAlbany about the start of the season, checking out some places in Europe and an interesting amusement park ride.

“I’ve been in Denmark for a month-and-a-half, and am very much enjoying my time here. 

Recently, I’ve been participating in volunteer work with the local elementary schools.  I volunteer three times a week and am helping the students prepare for the interschool basketball tournament they have coming up.  I’ve also been enjoying my coaching responsibilities.  I coach a U10 and U14 girls team and also help out with the U12 team.  Although there is still a communication barrier, I’ve learned some important Danish basketball terms and the girls have gotten better at their visual learning.  It’s rewarding to be able to share my love of basketball with the girls and watch them grow as players.

I’ve had the opportunity to visit a few different parts of Sweden for basketball games in the past few weeks.  I’m not sure what the occasion was, but one of the places we went had an old American car parade.  There were hundreds of Swedish people driving these old American cars around playing American music and waving American flags.  It was quite a sight!

I also was able to go to Tivoli Amusement park, the second oldest amusement park in the world and one of the more famous attractions in Copenhagen.  Tivoli is home to one of the oldest wooden roller coasters still in use.  It even had a brake man onboard to control the speed of the roller coaster around the corners.  Thankfully, I didn’t know his importance until after we finished or I might not have enjoyed the ride as much.  I also was able to go on one of the world’s tallest carousels and the view of Copenhagen was absolutely amazing.

We had our first league game yesterday and won.  Some of the main differences here are that the games are played in ten-minute quarters, only coaches can call timeouts and the three-point line is a little further back.  I also really miss the frequent media timeouts.  In addition, the games tend to be higher scoring because the shot clock is only 24 seconds.   We’ve been traveling a lot for our preseason contests and it was nice to play on our home court and actually have some fans in the stands.  It was especially touching to see a lot of the girls I coach in attendance.  Our next game is away and I look forward to seeing another part of Denmark.”