In its recent foreign tour, the Cardinal played against Le Mura Lucca, the former team of 2009 Stanford graduate and 2008 Olympian Jillian Harmon. Harmon led Lucca to a national title in 2016-17, averaging 17.2 points and 6.7 rebounds a game, before signing to play this year with Dike Napoli. She made the five-hour drive trek north from Naples to watch her former teams in action, connecting with her alma mater for the third time in Italy. Ciao a Tutte!
It was so fun watching Stanford play my former team in Lucca, Italy where Kayla Pedersen and I won the Italian League championship together last season!
I'm currently competing in my eighth year in the Italian League and I'm pretty lucky that Tara and staff seem to love Italy as much as I do. This is Stanford's third trip to Italy during my tenure here and it's helped make up for the numerous Final Four reunions I've missed out on while playing overseas. (It simultaneously makes me feel really old since the first of the three trips came in Como during my very first week overseas in 2009).
I honestly thought I might be crazy for driving five hours each way from my new team in Naples all the way up to Lucca to see a basketball game on my off day, but when I got to the gym and saw the team I knew it was absolutely worth it.
After speaking to the team and watching them play, I felt as if I knew these women and what they're experiencing without ever having met any of them previously. That's special to me. I truly felt as connected to the program as when I last played there. The reasons for this are many and include the continuity of the staff, the quality and type of person that the program recruits year after year and maybe the fact that Tara looks exactly the same. (She claims it's because she waterskis - I need to buy me some of those!)
Overall the trip brought me to the conclusion that I'd give anything to wear that Stanford jersey again and relive the experiences that I had with my teammates and I can really see that this team and these women are doing us vecchia's (oldies) proud.
Jill
A post shared by Jillian Harmon (@jharmon33) on Sep 10, 2017 at 12:05am PDT
A post shared by Jillian Harmon (@jharmon33) on Sep 11, 2017 at 12:31am PDT