Spartan Buddies! by Chelsea Lasky

This year, the Spartans began a new program to get in touch with Case Women’s Basketball alumae for networking and friendship purposes—if not just to share in the perils of running 5 suicides in a row because no one opened their mouth to call out a switch.

In August, we anxiously awaited the email from coach announcing our Spartan Buddy matches so we could introduce ourselves and get the alums reconnected to the program. Some players were matched with recent grads like Ashleigh Tondo, Anna Taylor and Mary Herendeen, while others received matches who matriculated before Coach Reimer’s time at Case.

I got my Spartan Buddy’s name, Tracy Roessner (pictured in purple with members of the women's basketball team above,) I sent an email and immediately got a response from a more-than-enthusiastic Tracy. Very quickly we formed a friendship which shares a love for basketball and a present/past not only as a student at Case, but an assistant coach here as well (for those of you who didn’t already know, I am student coaching this year).

Tracy lives in Chicago, so we shoot each other emails every so often; me to update Tracy on the season and see if anything is new with her, and her to give encouragement and just to talk about anything and everything.

One exciting thing about this whole match-up was getting to meet Tracy for the first time when we traveled to Chicago for conference play a couple weeks ago. We knew well in advance the date of the game, and we were both looking forward to meeting one another. In an email reminder of the date, Tracy responded, “I have been looking forward to it all month!” After the game, I got the chance to meet my Spartan Buddy and we talked through most of the guys’ game which followed.

I learned so much about what Case was like a few years ago, and I shared so much about how Case has changed and how we do things these days. Tracy and I do not share a major—she graduated with a social sciences degree and I am on track in the engineering school—but that didn’t stop us from talking about so much.

The Spartan Buddy program may just be in its inaugural year, but it is doing great things for past and present players at Case. Tracy shares the same love I have for the Case Basketball program and she hopes to see us succeed more and more each and every year. I think it’s safe to say the whole team, as well as Tracy, hope to repeat her senior year appearance in the NCAA Tournament back in 2002.