HELLO EVERYONE! 大家好! : CHINA TOUR 2014

In less than 24 hours, the Lakeland College women’s basketball team will be boarding a thirteen hour flight to Beijing, China from Chicago O’Hare International Airport.  The team is a part of a group that will be touring and studying in China for 17 days.  The group’s initial destination is Shanghai, the largest populated city in the world, 6,933 miles from home. We’re scheduled to land in Shanghai on Friday, and we’ll be there for eight nights to play some basketball, take classes and experience one of the world’s oldest cultures.  The remaining six nights will be spent in Nanchang, located in southeastern China.

The Muskies are scheduled to play two games, and attend classes at Lakeland’s sister schools; Shanghai Finance University and East Chinese Institute of Technology while in China. The remaining time will be spent seeing the sites including the Yuyuan (a famous garden downtown Shanghai, Dragon Tiger Mountain (a famous Taoism mountain in Jiangxi Province) and Fuzhou (the capital city of Fujian Province) to name just a few.

The group making the trip has all 14 of the current women’s basketball players; including ten underclassman and four seniors, four members of the coaching staff, two Lakeland professors, four Lakeland students and four family members round out the group of 28.

The trip is being organized and guided by David Lynch, instructor of General Studies and Chinese here at Lakeland. David (a Lakeland Alum) studied and lived in China for 10 years. 

Lakeland College Athletics Hall of Fame Coach April Arvan took the Muskies to London, England in 2003 and Florence, Italy in 2007, and it gives me great pride to carry on the tradition started by Coach A when she took her teams on foreign trips. Seven years later, we’re glad to continue that tradition and we’re excited for future Muskie teams to have this opportunity as well.

Five of the Lakeland’s players have been out of the country before but four have never flown or traveled outside of the Midwest. This is going to be an unforgettable cultural experience for this team and being able to do it with each other is going to make it that much more wonderful.  We can’t wait to get there.

This will be the first of many updates I plan to give while on this amazing trip. I will post again Friday night after we have arrived and settled in to the hotel. (Reminder; China is 13 hours ahead of CST)

Thanks for following us and we’re looking forward to sharing with you all the fun foreign adventures we will have!

Best to you,

Coach Vande