Lauren Van Kleunen

Lauren Van Kleunen is a redshirt sophomore on the Marquette Women’s basketball team, which means she is technically a junior academically. She is graduating this year and for the next two years, she plans on pursuing her master’s degree. Her first year here she didn’t play in games but she still practiced with the team. When the team started practicing in the summer before her freshman year started, she had trouble breathing while running and ended up finding out she had blood clots in her lungs. She now has a medical redshirt so she has four years of eligibility left. She played basketball in high school and felt that her high school basketball practice prepared her for a college type basketball practice so her transition was a lot smoother.

Her biggest struggle of being a student-athlete is sleep. Catching up on sleep is hard because even when there isn’t something that needs to be done right away, there’s always something that can be done for the future.

Some of the cool perks of being on the team is getting a lot of new clothes, shoes (about 20 pairs of shoes), they get a Tempurpedic mattress on their bed, they receive a scholarship for being on the team, a stipend every semester for when traveling home, the team travels a lot of cool places, and experiences a lot of cool things (they saw lion king in New York). Although there a lot of perks, the time commitment is huge. Preseason hours is 8 while in season hours are 20. Lauren says she sees the team more than she sees her own family. The team gets two weeks off in the summer, one right after school starts and one right before school starts up again. The season starts when school does and ends in around March depending on how far the team gets.

The Marquette women’s basketball team is now currently ranked number 11 in the top 25 of the NCAA. She says it’s cool being one of the best in the conference but that only means that more teams are wanting to beat you so bad. It’s a huge deal to be able to beat Marquette.

She says that getting a double-double in a game is nice because you know your hard work paid off, but she’s a lot happier if her teammate gets one. Her relationship with the rest of the team and the staff is amazing and she describes it as a family. A lot of joking happens and there is no drama whatsoever because everyone is so close. She hopes to have a job that does something with sports but especially basketball. With her major being PR and a minor in marketing, her dream job would be to be an announcer on ESPN but anything related to basketball after college would make her happy.

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