"Talk, talk, talk. I've lost my voice because I've talked so much. But it has helped me a lot, playing- wise. My teammates feel more comfortable be- ing around me, too. They know where I'm at.''
year, I knew that I would get my opportunity to play, so I decided that I needed to speak more. "I need to be the person on the team who speaks the whole time and brings the team 'up' every time we're down. So I talk the whole way through practice and our matches. "Talk, talk, talk. I've lost my voice because
I've talked so much. But it has helped me a lot, playing-wise. My teammates feel more comfortable being around me, too. They know where I'm at.'' Waite knows where she's coming from. After
all, he went to Norway to recruit her. One of Mikaelsen's national team coaches had a con- nection with a former UW assistant. Some e- mails were exchanged between Wisconsin and some other U.S. volleyball programs. "I wanted to come to American because I thought it would be a cool thing to experience because volleyball is not a big thing in Nor- way,'' Mikaelsen said. "When I heard that they had a scholarship available (at Wisconsin), I read about the school.'' She still remembers the first time that Waite attended one of her practices, and she still chuckles at the memory of the logistical chal- lenge that he faced in getting to her Norwegian school. "You have to take a little boat for about two hours because it's in a fjord,'' she said When she was 17, Mikaelsen enrolled in
what she called a "volleyball high school'' that was about eight hours away from her home in
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