(Editor's note: Duke junior guard Sheana Mosch, the Blue Devils' co-captain, will share a weekly diary with ESPN.com throughout the season.)

Nov. 9, 2001

We finally have our first game on Sunday! We're starting out against Texas Tech at 1 p.m. (ESPN) in the State Farm Women's Tip-Off Classic. Purdue and Oklahoma will also be here, so there should be some pretty good basketball going on during the opening weekend of the 2001-02 season.

	Sheana Mosch has helped lead Duke to its second Final Four appearance.

It feels as if it has taken forever to get the season rolling, especially with the kind of preseason we had this year. Our conditioning coaches, William Stephens and Jeff Howser, worked us really hard. In addition to lifting, playing pickup and doing pool workouts, they always had something interesting for us every Tuesday and Thursday. We did the same workouts as the men's team and it usually consisted of continual sprints, slides and various agility drills.

Some of those were the hardest workouts I have ever done in my life, but it put us into really good game shape. Needless to say, we are so glad that we have started practice.

We're already so much further ahead than we were last year. A lot of this has to do with our trip to Australia during the month of August. Our two freshmen, Monique Currie and Wynter Whitley, weren't able to go with us, but it was great to get the eight returners back and playing with each other again.

The team was there for a total of 12 days and toured around Sydney, Brisbane and Cairns. We only played four games, so the trip wasn't all about basketball. We spent a lot of time together, and with such a small group, we had definitely gotten closer once we returned home.

For that reason alone our trip was a success. I feel a lot closer to this group of teammates than I did during my freshman and sophomore seasons, and I can see that this is going to be key to reaching all our goals.

We trust each other with all our hearts and it transfers onto the court in our team chemistry. We click well together and are very encouraging, yet can also constructively criticize each other without any hard feelings in the end. So in these developments in our team, I'm looking forward to getting started and hopefully seeing great results out on the court.

Practice makes perfect
We have a really good group of practice guys this year who we go up against every day. For the most part, they're stronger and quicker than all of us, so we really have to work hard to get anything accomplished against them. It can be so frustrating and almost depressing at moments -- sometimes you'll work so hard to beat them down the court or box them out and they still get a layup. But no matter how much our egos get shot down, we know it's best for us.

Coach G always wants practices to be harder than games (and they sure are at times), and there's no better way than doing it against people who are better than us. We had a really good practice Friday -- after having Thursday off and our first game coming up on Sunday, everybody was so turbo charged.

We're excited to get our season started and Texas Tech is going to be a great challenge for us to see just how far we've developed.