When Angela Morley woke up Thursday morning, she realized study time for finals was almost gone.
The senior middle and the rest of the MSU volleyball team left Thursday night for South Bend, Ind., for the first and second rounds of the NCAA Tournament.
The Spartan volleyball team is in the same boat as nearly all other MSU students. A stressful week of prepping has just past and a week of finals soon begins.
But the difference between nonathlete students and those on the volleyball team is the Spartans will have to divvy up their time on the road. They'll have to prepare for two possible matches, travel, studying and relaxation - maybe.
Not helping the team's cause is their first- and second-round schedule. The Spartans could have played in a Thursday-Friday or Friday-Saturday match, but instead a Saturday-Sunday schedule was selected by Notre Dame, which will host those rounds.
If the team is victorious against George Mason in Saturday's first round, MSU will play in Sunday's 4 p.m. match. Regardless of a win or loss, the team probably won't return to MSU until around 10 p.m. Sunday.
"I'm pretty stressed out right now," Morley said. "It's your last hurrah and you want to do well on your exams, but you don't feel like you have the time to put into it."
With a typical 7 p.m. contest, a day on the road for the volleyball team goes as follows: The team gets a wake-up call at 9:30 a.m. and eats a team breakfast 30 minutes later. Players then have roughly four hours to relax before the pre-game meal.
Directly following the quick feast, the team leaves for the site of the evening's match. The next three and a half hours are spent practicing and receiving physical therapy and other treatments before the first ball is served.
With all that going on, study time is very limited. But coaches try to make the student-athlete life easier with designated homework times.
"On the road, we are always given study time," sophomore outside hitter Kim Schram said. "Some weekends we study more than others, but this weekend, instead of painting nails and watching TV, I know all of us will be studying hard at every spare moment."
Morley calls herself lucky. She said she'll be using every moment to study, but she doesn't have an exam until Wednesday and can afford to relax a little more than her teammates.
Other Spartans don't have that luxury. Schram has an honors economics exam on Monday and a Japanese exam Tuesday.
But even she can consider herself lucky when considering junior setter Nikki Colson's schedule. Colson has a final exam at the earliest possible time - 7:45 a.m. Monday.
But Colson said she's a veteran when it comes to planning for these things. Colson began studying early in the week to avoid any last minute crunching.
"This is my third year, so I know how this works toward the end of the year with volleyball becoming stressful and school becoming stressful," she said. "I'm at the point where I have it managed.
"But it may be different for some of the younger players, especially freshmen. I remember when I was a freshman
