A Grand Junction Journal

By By Todd Doolittle/mcc pitcher
Day 2
May 24, 2003
I roomed on the second floor of the hotel in Hays, Kan., along with Chris Moffett and Phillip Garrett. We went right to bed after being on the bus from 9 a.m. to 2:30 in the morning Wednesday.
Sleep was not easy to come by in our room, because the
air conditioner didn't work. We finally had to open the door just to get some air in around six in the morning.
Wake up call was at 9:30 a.m., and I went to breakfast with Moffett and Corey Littleton at a McDonalds that was right next to the hotel.
We all piled back into the bus at 11 a.m., and we started are final leg of the trip to Grand Junction, Colo.
I slept for most of the trip on the second day. From what my teammates were saying, I didn't miss anything sleeping through pretty much all of Kansas. When I was awake, I kept looking out the window waiting for the Mountains to pop up. It began to get hilly around 3 p.m., so I knew we were getting closer to Colorado.
We went through Denver around 4 p.m., and you could start to see the Rocky Mountains. The best part of the trip so far came around 6:30 p.m. today when we pulled off at a roadside lookout point in Summit, Colo.
You had a perfect view of the mountains on the other side of the highway.
It was really exciting, the scenery here is unreal. We climbed up a little bit of a mountain that the lookout was next to, and our shortstop Brandon Rousseve and pitcher Brian Eubanks found a patch of snow at the top.
It was about 10-feet by 10-feet, and it was about a foot deep. We immediately started a snowball fight, and we lofted snowballs over the side of the cliff.
We were trying to hit the coaches, who were standing at the bottom. I got hit in the back and on my foot on my way back down.
Coach Federico (head coach Michael Federico) and our
left fielder Josh Morgan both picked up large rocks to take back as souvenirs from the trip. We have a rock from the mountains in our locker room from the program's first trip to the Junior College World Series in 1993.
We will add one of these rocks to the locker room. I was relieved when we finally pulled into our hotel in Grand Junction, Colo. The trip was fun hanging out with all the guys, but I'm ready to be able to sleep in a real bed.
Now that the games are getting closer, Im starting to think about them more. When I ran up the hill, I got winded, and I'm in good shape.
I'm wondering how the thin air will affect me on the mound and my pitches.
I guess I will find out how the conditions will affect my performance when we practice at 11 a.m. today. But for now it is time to get a good night sleep, and this time, the air conditioner is working in the room.