Courtney Scanlan (Salamanca, N.Y.), a sophomore member of the Stony Brook University volleyball team will represent the United States of America over the next few weeks in Croatia for the 2015 European Global Challenge.

Seawolves' head coach Coley Pawlikowski and associate head coach Dan Pawlikowski will coach the BIP/USA Development Team with Vogel and fellow senior Stephanie McFadden (San Juan Capistrano, Calif.) on the roster, while sophomores Cydney Bowman (Lake Mary, Fla.) and Courtney Scanlan (Salamanca, N.Y.) will play for Team BIP (Bring it Promotions, LLC).

During their journey, each student-athlete will be blogging about their experiences.

Today is my third day in Europe and I absolutely love it. The trip started off with some long flights and bus rides in order to get to Slovenia. The layover in Germany was brutal because nobody was patient with tourists who had no idea where they were going. But when we finally landed in Venice our team was ready and waiting for us to board the vans for Maribor, Slovenia.

Our hotel has our practice gym built right into it downstairs which makes it really convenient for us. All of our meals are served to us buffet style in either the restaurant downstairs or the meeting rooms. So far the food has been pretty decent. Since we normally don't get out of training until 9, we just have pasta and chicken to choose from. The second day we got to Slovenia we played a match against the Italian Jr. National Team after only two practices. Our team meshes really well together and we have great team chemistry which is very important when only knowing these girls for the past 48 hours. Unfortunately, we lost the game in 5 sets, but it is only a starting point so we can see what we need to fix during tournament play next week in Croatia.

The next day we were all pretty excited to do some sight-seeing after playing in the gym for the past two days. Our team as well as a few other teams staying with us loaded a bus and headed to Ljubljana, Slovenia's capital, to explore. Since none of us had any euros, we headed to the local ATM to withdraw some cash. Cyd was first in line and she almost took out 10,000 euros because she thought there was a decimal point in there too. It was hilarious watching her panic and try to cancel her transaction. After, we all took a glass elevator to the top of the city where the castle is where we got a beautiful arial view of the entire city. The mountains are huge here with snow covered tops because the altitude is so high. We definitely took enough selfies between the girls on the team and coaching staff as well. As we were leaving the city we stopped at the cutest gelato shop right along the water. Yes, it was only 10 a.m. but it's never too early for gelato (so I was told).

The next stop was Bled, Slovenia where the famous Lake Bled is that we got to explore. There were a ton of different restaurants along the outside of it where we were free to chose where to go. A bunch of us were craving dominos pizza so we decided a pizzeria was the place to go. After lunch we walked to the other side of the lake and all laid out in our bathing suits while dipping our toes in the warm water.

Once we got home we had a little down time to rest and prepare for our match against Israel. The match started at 7 and didn't finish until 9:30. We dropped the first two sets but we ended up coming back and winning the entire match. The last set is always played to 15 but ours ended at 27-25. We were happy that we pushed enough to come back and win!

This entire trip has been an amazing learning experience that I wouldn't trade for anything. I can't wait to see what the rest of the trip has in store for me.

-Courtney