33. 2. 31. 3.
They’re displayed in a blocky crimson font on the back of crisp white jerseys. Four players drape their arms around each other’s shoulders.
The 33 is Amanda Cahill’s. They call her “B” — it’s her middle initial — for short.
The 2 belongs to Walter, who they call J.J.
Cahill gave her that nickname.
“It just kind of flows,” she said.
Maura Muensterman is No. 31. When Jess and Maura first met, Jess asked if she could call her “Mo,” not knowing that was Maura’s nickname growing up among her friends and family.
“Then she just added another ‘o’ and started calling me “Moo,” Muensterman said.
Standing on the right end, Tyra Buss reaches up for Muensterman’s shoulder. Buss wears No. 3. She was nicknamed “T.T.” by her freshman teammates.
The four make up the IU women’s basketball freshman class. Until arriving on campus last summer, they barely knew each other aside from what they learned via social media. They moved to Bloomington in June 2014.
B, J.J., Moo and T.T. became friends immediately.
“We went through a big transition together,” Cahill said. “It’s a big life transition coming to college, and I think being able to lean on each other, it really bonded us.”
The four had a lot in common: 7:30 a.m. workouts, mandatory study hours, trips to the community showers, including the sharing of one towel and a single bar ?of soap.
Then there were summer classes. All four ended up in the same one — Folklore. The class had nothing to do with any of their majors, it was just a general education course they happened to all be ?enrolled in.
Cahill gave them the name “The Fresh Folk Four.”
“Fresh” because they were freshmen and “Folk” because, as they learned in class, a folk group is one that shares a common ?identity.
“B really pushed it pretty hard,” Walter said about the new name. “We were pretty resistant, but we’ve grown to embrace it.”
Well, most of them have.
“I’m still resistant,” Muensterman said.
But Cahill still has faith in the name. “I think she’s starting to come around.”
The four live together in a suite in Briscoe — Jess and Maura share one room, Amanda and Tyra are in the other.
One night over winter break they were trying to think of an invention they could create, ?Walter said.
Without much success, they instead decided to start a blog. They called it “The Folk.”
The posts are discussed by all four but written mostly by Walter. They began by telling stories from their first summer together in Bloomington.
“Broken promises. Near death experiences. The thrill of a lifetime,” one post begins.
It recalled the day they first visited the quarries.
“It all started with a scooter,” opens another, recollecting the Folk’s pranking war with the men’s basketball freshmen.
“We’re waiting for them to prank us back,” Maura said. She paused, turning to her teammates. “We could just prank them again.”
Walter said the blog was just a way for them to entertain themselves. Aside from pranking people, the four spend their time watching Netflix — a lot of Netflix.
The blog shares where each came from, what they’re majoring in, what they want to do with their post-college lives. It talks about their shortcomings and struggles in adapting to college life.
Cahill is afraid of birds. Walter is still learning her left from her right. Muensterman had to adjust to a change in identity — she wasn’t a huge fan of her new nickname “Moo,” which sometimes extends to “Moose” or “Manny” or “Mooseph.”
For Buss, who ran cross-country in high school, it took encouragement from her teammates to stop enjoying early-morning workouts.
“She was up and at ‘em at 5:50 a.m. at the start of summer, getting a few jogs in up and down the dorm hallway,” the blog reads. “She slowly worked out of the literal early ‘rise and grind’ phase, and now we are trying to convince her to pull us in a wagon for our next timed mile test.”
They’ve recently added a commenting system to the blog for readers to leave their thoughts.
“The only comment so far is from my dad,” Walter said, laughing. “So we’re working on that.”
Since getting busy with the start of the second semester, the four have stopped posting as frequently but most recently wrote about their new classes.
Dance, art and music were included. No folklore.
But the four still sign off every post the same way.
“Til next time,” it says, “love y’all long time.
~The Folk Four”
