SOMO News

This post was written by SOMO volunteer Linda Tyler, who traveled to the USA Games to watch and cheer on all of her friends.

What an amazing week we had in Seattle for USA Games 2018! April, Jeanie, Sarah, and I had a fantastic week cheering on Team Missouri! My best friend Gina from Reno, NV came up to hang out with us for a few days as well. We started by going to the send off party for the St. Louis group and helped with registration of the athletes and watched the presentation. Then we were off to the airport. We were on the same flight as the team which was pretty fun because we got to see the team’s excitement.

We had a great first full day in Seattle on Saturday! We went and picked up our credentials, learned how to get everywhere on the light rail, walked around the market, went to the gum wall, went on a boat cruise, went to dinner at a restaurant where the movie Sleepless In Seattle had parts filmed in, got cupcakes, and made it back to the hotel for the night! We were all ready for bed so we can start again early tomorrow morning.

We had another awesome day on Sunday.  We went to the fan zone, then opening ceremonies, then dinner at a Mexican restaurant. After dinner we went up in the Space Needle. Then we rode the monorail back to the light rail station to get back to the hotel.

We had to get up really early Monday to figure out how to get to softball on the public bus system. Monday was a very busy but fun day. We left the hotel by 6:30 am and didn’t get back until 10:30pm! We went and watched softball game 1 then went to watch swimming for a little while.  After that we went back to softball for game 2. After the softball games were over we headed back to the University of Washington to watch some bocce, a basketball game, and some of the athletics awards. We really learned all the interesting public transportation options today, we did pretty much every type of them!

On Tuesday, we started our day watching athletics, then we went over to bocce for a little while, then went to watch the basketball team play. After the basketball game we headed back to bocce for a little while, then went to more athletics awards. The last thing we did on Tuesday was we went to watch some powerlifting. We had a great time cheering on Charlie from Team Missouri!

Wednesday was another very busy and fun day. We started the day by going to watch our bowling teams complete in Unified Teams, then we heading to athletics, then we went to watch some tennis. After we were done with tennis, we went to dinner in University Village, which was a really cool place close to campus with a lot of shops and restaurants. After dinner we went back to campus for the 4th of July party with our team. On the way back to our hotel, we got to see some fireworks.

On Thursday, we started our day at softball, then we went over to swimming, then back to softball, then back to swimming. After swimming, we were trying to make it to Seattle University at the championship game for basketball. There was so much traffic so we didn’t think we would make it but then found out the game so over an hour late so we made it to basketball before the game had started. After the game we went back to University Village to eat dinner and finally got some very yummy chocolate from Frans! Third time’s a charm, we tried going to Frans two other days prior and both times they had just closed 2 to 5 minutes prior to us getting there. After dinner, we went and said some goodbyes to our team since Jeanie, Sarah, and I had to leave for the airport Friday morning.

We had such a great time this week cheering on Team Missouri. We made it to 8 of our 9 sports at least once this week if not 2 or 3 times. Sorry to the golf team for not making it out to see you! All the athletes did a great job this week! I think we got to experience almost every type of transportation this week from buses, lyft’s, uber, light rail, amtrak, monorail, and charter buses. We really learned every way to get from venue to venue. We had a amazing time and loved being fans to cheer on Team Missouri!