I really liked the story in today’s Daily Collegian about Nicole Arcidiacono, a senior on the Lady Lion basketball team.

Arcidiacono joined the team as a walk-on two years ago, and although she has since earned a scholarship, she still plays only sparingly. Penn State has to have a pretty insurmountable lead before she gets into the game, and that doesn’t happen too often.

Yet she plays a big role on the team, according to the Collegian piece.

“She’s always telling us what we need to be doing and always sending us text messages reminding us about every little thing there is to know,” freshman guard Alex Bentley says in the article. “She’s almost like the Team Mom.”

And Arcidiacono (who, by the way, has a name that’s fun to say; it’s pronounced arch-ee-dee-OCK-uh-no) seems to relish her experiences as a part of the team, even if she rarely gets a chance to play in the actual games: “If I had to do it all over again,” she says, “I would do it in a heartbeat.”

Tina Hay, editor