Thoughts of a D1 Athlete

     This past week I've been experiencing changes in my body that I'm extremely familiar with. Since high school, I've always had knee problems and they've seemed to get worse once I got to college. The summer of my sophomore year I finally got surgery and hoped that it solved all of my problems. It was broken off cartilage floating around so the doctor went in and cleaned everything up. The surgery wasn't a guarantee that I'll be perfectly fine from there on but it was a start. Me being optimistic I thought I could finally play basketball at my full potential. Given that I didn't play as much my freshman year and then going into my sophomore year I was recovering from the surgery, this year was supposed to be the year I could finally play healthy minutes.       With a starting position in the lineup this year, I've stepped into a new role, a new era of basketball for me. Finally getting comfortable with playing at a colligate level with high minutes, a

Hi there, I'm Nika Dorsey, and I'm here to share with you all a glimpse into the everyday life of a Division 1 athlete. To give you a brief overview of my background, I'm a junior studying social media marketing. I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan (go lions!), and I have spent almost my whole childhood playing basketball. At Bradley University, I play women's basketball. We play teams in our conference at the highest level of collegiate basketball.  I will be using this platform to highlight all of the challenges, successes, failures, and more that most student athletes face.  As we compete in the Missouri Valley Conference with some of the top players in the country, we are often faced with many challenges. Our 1-6 conference record is a clear representation of how tough these teams are. We’ve faced our biggest upset against Illinois State in a 74-78 loss. We were fighting tooth and nail for the majority of the game and ended up falling short at the end. It was