We're on a bus right now traveling through the Smokey Mountains at 35 mph and I'm looking at my exhausted team as they watch video footage of our ESPNU games at the UCLA regional.

It's always a great idea to see how you play on film so that you can see how you're swinging at a ball and what you may or may not be doing well at the plate and in the field. It also gives you an opportunity to laugh at and with your team when they do something "out of character." For instance, Kate Robinson's jumping jack in the air when Kaulana (Gould) caught a hard hit ball to center field that would have easily been a double for UCLA or the candid shots of Stacey (Yamada) in the dugout attempting to wave around a wilted two-day-old ti leaf.

In addition to the laughter, the tapes provided a constant reminder that we are on ESPN and we're a part of the top 16 D1 softball teams in the nation that are still playing ball. That's huge.

This bus ride is finalizing the last leg of our trip to Knoxville, Tenn. We woke up very early in L.A., 4 a.m. in fact, and caught a plane to Houston which then took us to South Carolina. I don't know if it's our Hawai'i traveling shirts, or the fact that we're a team, but people seem to always feel the need to let us know that they either played a sport in college, or that they have visited Hawai'i and continue to tell us about a place many of us have grown up in.

As you can imagine, the girls act as polite as can be but between the hours of 4 and 7 a.m., many of them have a "do not speak to me" sign posted on their foreheads and give their best effort to put on smiles and good conversation, but signs of struggle are quite apparent. It humors me, I love it.

Our biggest issue at this precise moment is that we all need to get laundry done! We're working on our third week on the road, so as you can imagine, we have an accumulation of clothing that needs to get washed. It is certainly not a crisis, but after practice tomorrow, we will work on "addressing" that issue.

We practice tomorrow at 1 p.m. Coach is giving us a few hours to adjust to the time difference and do interviews with the media and radio shows who are interested in our "game plan" for the upcoming games. It's a very exciting time, but it's also something we're not used to (constant media, cameras at our games, phone calls at all hours, etc.), so it's going to be very important that we remain focused on playing our best softball.

Tennessee is not going to be an easy team to beat; all of us know that. It is vital that we keep working on our hitting and keep our defense tight in these upcoming practices, and it is vital that we get those clothes washed!