Most people are not privileged enough to get woken up in the morning by Tori Waldner. Then again, most people are not Division I basketball player Candice Agee.
She’s pretty easy to pick out of a crowd, especially standing at 6-foot-6, but being easily recognizable on campus and getting out of bed in the morning are on opposite spectrums.
The true freshman post player has admitted to having some struggles getting up in the morning, and that’s where her roommate Waldner has been there to watch her back.
“Sometimes if I’m late she’ll wake me up like ‘Hey it’s time to go,’ ” Agee said jokingly. “Sometimes my alarm doesn’t go off, Tori is my alarm for me.”
Waldner, who’s a sophomore and also mans the post, constantly tries to remind her to get her schoolwork done and to stay caught up with things. It’s a role that she kind of took on being her roommate, but it’s something that she has experience with.
Last year, Waldner was the lone freshman on the Lady Lions roster, so she understands what Agee is going through because she had to go through it before.
Despite being the only true newcomer to the Lions –– it’s redshirt junior guard Dara Taylor’s second season in the program, but her first eligible year to play –– Agee can relate to her roommate, so she does not have to go through the transition period alone.
“She’s helping me out a lot. She’s like, ‘whenever you feel like this is happening, you can always do this and it’ll help,’ so she’s really been great,” Agee said.
Agee was fortunate enough to arrive in Happy Valley in the summer, so she was able to get aquatinted with the campus before all the students piled back into State College in the fall. Thankfully for her, she became familiar with the campus pretty quickly and was no longer “a lost puppy.”
She admits that the college game is much different from the playing style that she encountered back home at Silverado High School in Victorville, Calif. It will take some time for her to continue to make adjustments to her game, but the McDonald’s All-American knows that she needs to improve on her conditioning and continue to hit the weight room.
Even with all the changes in her life over the course of the past few months, Agee is grateful for her teammates and how they have accepted her into the program with open arms.
“My team takes all the pressure off of me, they’re just really great,” Agee said. “They just make it easy to be a freshman here, especially being the only freshman, it’s a little bit harder. Every single one of these girls has my back in some way and I couldn’t ask for a better group to be with.”
