In Which We Both Give and Receive

Last Sunday was the Fall Sports Awards Ceremony and because we are a festive bunch, the soccer team followed that up with a team dinner and White Elephant gift exchange.

The various awards given to the team for the 2011 season include:
Most Valuable Player Bri Schliebinger
Most Improved Player Charlotte de Tar
Lisa Sorensen was our lone representative on the Midwest Conference all-Conference team
The team selected Becky Esrock and Lisa Sorensen as our captains for the 2012 season

We didn't have a great win/loss record but there is no question that the team award recipients deserve the accolades. We had some great individual efforts at various points throughout the season--it is just a shame that more of them could not be recognized.

Later in the afternoon, after the Bears had lost an ugly one to the Chiefs, we gathered around and enjoyed a meal and a gift swap. The team gave the coaches some great gifts that they will no doubt enjoy for years to come. AND we all contributed a gift to the Athletic Department's Toys For Tots drive.

It was a good way to get together and enjoy one another before finals and the holiday break begins.

Photos follow!

Maeve!!

Maeve Connelly, a sophomore who was new to the soccer team this year, is more than just one of the best back-up GKs in the conference: she is a hockey player. And this week she has been more than just "a" hockey player; she is THE hockey player. As in, MVP for the week. Apparently she scored a couple of game winning goals or something.

Nice work kid. I talked to your agent, she said you'll be signing autographs at the rink following the next home game. Make sure you don't leave before I get mine.

The Post-season

This is the first post-season in years that we have not been playing in the Midwest Conference tournament. So while we sit at home and ponder what went wrong, soccer is still being played. In fact, other than the few weeks during a World Cup, this might be the best time of year to be a soccer fan.

Division III: Information about the Midwest Conference soccer results can be found here. Carroll University beat St. Norbert College to advance to the NCAA Tournament. THey will be taking on St. Benedict at Dubuque, Iowa this Saturday. Good luck to the Pioneers in representing the MWC! The rest of the bracket can be found on the NCAA website.

Divison II: The NCAA bracket selection show is tonight. Information :available here

Divison I: Last week the Divison I conferences held their conference tournaments, allowing some teams to up their RPI and chances of getting an at-large bid. Illinois, for example, played and won 3 OT games at Northwestern last week to win the Big Ten Tournament. Beating OSU, Michigan State, and regular season champion Penn State was huge for them as they earned an automatic bid to the tourney. Penn State, as regular season champion, secured an at-large bid. Penn State is worth watching as their striker, Maya Hayes, leads the nation in goals (26) and points (60). Check out the bracket.

In addition to all the college soccer (men's tournaments are going on too) Major League soccer playoffs have been extrememly competitive and exciting this year. THe LA Galaxy just beat Real Salt Lake to win the Western Conference Championship, while Houston Dynamo bested Sporting Kansas City to take the East. The two conference champs will meet in LA on November, 20 to compete for the MLS Cup.

Whew. Lots happening. Flip on the TV and catch some of the action!

Seniors

Yesterday was senior day and the team made some signs and had a little thank you ceremony before our noon game against Carroll.

There will be more here on our seniors later, but for now, let me just say to Isabel Brown, Erica May, Mira Trebilcock, and Tash Poulopoulos: Thank you. You all will be missed. It was fun to watch you grow up these last four years. Please remember that you will ALWAYS be a Forester and will always be welcome and encouraged to come back and visit. Good luck!

Halloween Practice

It has become tradition that we dress up for a Halloween practice. This year was no different.
Every team needs a dairy cow on the Disabled List
Coach Bell as the Grim Reaper
Cats. (Wearing shirts suspiciously similar to the truck driver, discuss)
A pregnant truck driver (you maybe had to be there)
An alien from Toy Story
Ninja Turtles. Rafael and Michelangelo I think
A Kouple of Kardashians: Kim and Khloe

Win or Lose, We Study

Sunday morning at the Cambria Suites in Appleton, WI. We play in 4 hours, but after a morning stroll and a delicious breakfast, members of the both the men's and women's teams find some time to study in the lobby.

America's Dairyland

This weekend the Foresters' bus is heading north, to (hopefully) beat some Cheeseheads. Our opponents, the Ripon College Redhawks and the Lawrence University Vikings, are both nestled in small to medium sized towns in Northeastern Wisconsin, firmly within the radius of Green Bay Packers fandom.

The women are going all-in on Saturday. We want to win, we want to play well, we want to enjoy playing this great game with one another. In that spirit, this blog is going to ignore Lawrence and Appleton and the question of what the Vikings have to do with a landlocked paper-mill-dominated town in the American Midwest, and focus solely on Ripon, a small town with an interesting story.

On February 28, 1854 a group of about 30 people (I assume they were men) gathered in a small white schoolhouse in Ripon, WI. These men, all opponents of the spreading of slavery and vehemently against the recently passed
Nebraska Act decided to form a new political party that would have that opposition as a central tenet of its platform.
They decided to call this party 'Republican' to link it to the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers. Months later, the first group that gathered under the name "Republican Party" met in Jackson, MI; giving that town a similar claim as the Birthplace of the Republican Party.




By 1858 the Republican Party dominated the Northern States, while the Democratic Party dominated the South. Two years later, in 1860, the Party nominated a self-educated Illinois lawyer for President. Abraham Lincoln had represented Illinois in Congress as a member of the Whig party, but he was instrumental in forming and uniting the Republican Party under the idea of "Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men." That labor should not be done by slaves, which cheapened the idea of hard work for everyone, but rather by free men; land should not be locked up in large plantations but rather available for independent, small farmers; and that holding people in chains was not what the Founding Fathers had meant by "all men are created equal."

On Saturday we will find ourselves in Ripon, the birthplace of the Party that nominated a President who saw our nation through a divisive and unique Civil War. We will come on a bus filled with men and women from all over the country, from all different cultural and racial backgrounds, with all different kinds of political beliefs. We will come, we will play, and we will leave, all beneficiaries of a legacy begun when those 30 white men met in a schoolhouse in 1854. Maybe we'll even remember to thank them and those who followed in their footsteps in fighting for equality.

All Foresters Are Part of Another Team:

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

Christopher Robin to Winnie the Pooh

A Day Of Small Competitions

We haven't had a ton of good luck on the soccer field lately (at least during games) so we've decided to spend the week getting back to the basics--how to compete, why is competing fun, how can we help our teammates compete. In that spirit, we had a number of small and somewhat bizarre games at practice today. The team was divided into two groups:

The Blue Barracudas

and Team Pride

They arm wrestled (no photo available),

played towel tug of war,

did push-ups (predictably the Canadian won, all that chopping down trees and wrestling bears makes you strong),

ran an obstacle course

sumo-ed with pads,

and wrestled (which is not as weird as it may seem, I swear) .

All in all, a good time was had by all. Not to mention that we COMPETED and WORKED.

And our training staff was available to provide Gatorade and emotional support.
Thanks Nikki and Sam!

It's Harvest Time!

It is supposed to be an unseasonably warm 86 degrees in Grinnell, IA this weekend and incredibly windy. We have a big weekend in front of us with our first long family bus trip. We will leave Friday afternoon from Lake Forest and with a stop for dinner at the World's Largest Truck Stop we should arrive in Grinnell late tonight.




We play tomorrow morning at 11am and the men's game will follow and then it's back to LF, hopefully with a couple of Conference victories.

Bus Behaviors

College teams tend to spend long hours on buses. In our case, it isn't as bad as it could be, given that Lake Forest is pretty centrally located in our Conference, but we still get bored and restless.

Everyone has a different bus routine. We have had players who did nothing but sleep from the second they got on to the minute they were poked awake by a teammate. We have players who bring their laptops and watch endless hours of Law and Order: SVU. Coach Bell likes to watch movies. Coach Geiser reads.

Throughout the year I hope to post a few more examples of bus behavior, but here are the usual routines.

Traveling without the men gives us lots of room to spread out



Below: Cassie demonstrates the thousand yard stare. This is quite useful when you are on your third hour of driving through cornfields.





The iPod/sleep combination is one of the more popular activities. Here, Erica shows how it is done



And finally, for the more ambitious student-athlete, or one with looming midterms, there is studying. Here Audra shows off her pink neck pillow and her perfect posture

It's Been Raining A Lot In The Forest

We are making staying dry on the sidelines an art form. (Notice the boot)

A Blueboy Discussion

Tomorrow is Parents' Day at Lake Forest College. There will be a breakfast for families in the morning, a F.A.N. Club tailgate prior to kickoff, and a men's game following ours. Of course, it would be great if all of those fun events resulted in two wins for the Foresters over the Blueboys/Lady Blues.

And this leads me to our topic of the day: sex-specific mascots. As a female athlete and now coach I have always resented such names (like the Lady Foresters) because it suggests that REAL Foresters are men and the women are a cheap knock-off version. However, there MAY be an exception with the Illinois College Blueboys.

The Blueboy is a reference to Union Soldiers, who wore blue (as opposed to the Confederate Greys). Now, while I am sure women could have fired a minie ball as accurately as men, the fact is that they didn't and BlueBoys were almost always exactly that--boys. [As a history teacher I feel obligated to note that WWI American soldier were referred to as "Doughboys" and WWII era soldiers were the more sex-neutral "G.I.s"--short for Government Issue, which was stamped on most of the Army's goods.] Anyway, in the case of Illinois College and their Blueboys is it okay that they are the "Lady Blues" or not? Should they still be Blueboys? Should we just treat a mascot like we treat the term "guys" and act as though they are all sex-neutral? Or is the problem the term "Lady" which tends to invoke images of tea and crumpets instead of sweat and aggressive play?

Home Again, Home Again

Whew! This has been a long week of travel and road games. Because this blog is hard to update from the soccer bus we are a little behind here...

Last Saturday we traveled to Mequon, WI outside Milwaukee to play the Falcons of Concordia-WI. Anya informed the coaching staff on the way there that it was referred to as "The 'Quon" by people in the know. It was a gorgeous warm day in The Quon and we opened the first half with The Bri Show by promptly giving up 4 breakaways. Bri was able to save a couple and convince the Concordia shooters to go wide on their other attempts, giving us a chance. Somehow we went into halftime up 1-0 and managed to win towards the end of the second overtime to go to 2-0 for the season.

On Monday we fought a little traffic (so did our poor fans) to get out to Lisle, IL and Benedictine College. We started the game at 7pm on a beautiful night under the lights with the moon hanging just over the bleachers. Unfortunately the moon was the prettiest thing about the night as we played some pretty ugly soccer. On the upside, some rookies were given the chance to get some playing time and we discovered that they were all more than able to hold their own. So we earned a loss and discovered some depth. Foresters go to 2-1.

Thursday we all piled back on the bus and traveled back north to America's Dairyland for our first conference game against the Beloit College Buccaneers. Here again we struggled to play the good-looking soccer that we are occasionally capable of, but after a tough battle with an undermanned Bucs squad, and giving up our second PK in two games, we eked out a win to lift our record to 3-1 overall and 1-0 in the MWC. And as we tried to remind ourselves afterward, a win is a win.

Saturday it was back on the bus for our first "family" trip with the Men's team. It was long but successful as both teams posted convincing wins against the Red Devils (I refuse to say 'Lady Red Devils'). Mostly, for the women at least, the day was goofy, amusing, and a good reminder that sometimes the soccer doesn't matter--it's just nice to hang out in a cornfield with your buddies once in a while. I suspect none of us will see an aquarium mural again without remembering this day with a smile. And the word "Narnia" now has a very specific meaning for the Foresters.

After a long day on the bus the day before, the coaching staff woke up nervous on Sunday. We were hosting Carthage College at our home turf and expected them to be strong, fast, skilled, and aggressive. Carthage was all of those things but we manged to keep them off the scoreboard while we began to fight back, battle for 50/50 balls, possess the ball a little, move in support of our teammates, and remember how to play on our fast turf. Besides all of that, perhaps one of the most important things we did versus Carthage was to show heart. We had had a long weekend already, and yet when Carthage scored early in the second half we didn't fall apart. Instead we fought back and quickly tied the score again. The rest of the half we held our own and tried to allow our opponent as few good scoring opportunities as possible. Our forwards pressured, our midfield possessed, our defense dominated; and when all of those things fell just short, our goalkeeper made a save to pick us all back up. It was a geniune team effort that was rewarded with our second overtime victory of the year. If what Coach Bell said in the huddle is true, if OT really is "all about heart," then we certainly proved we have it. It was a fun win and a good weekend for us. We are 5-1 and hopefully beginning to discover our potential.

Foresters Chop Warriors

A convincing first win for our first game, our first home game, and the collegiate debut for our 8 rookies. Megan O'Connor's first collegiate goal opened up the season's scoring and we went from there.

Box score and full recap available here

Not much else too add, so here are a few photos from game day.


The Foresters are ready to run

Game time approaches...tick, tock, tick, tock

Warm ups begin

Our jerseys await

And we play!

Missing A Teammate

And keeping the Esrock family in our thoughts. Take care you guys. Hope to see you all soon.

Out of Hibernation

The Forester Soccer blog has been in hiding, saving our strength for the upcoming season. But as the team is emerging out of our off season slumber, as the rookies are learning the ropes and gaining confidence, and the returning players shake off the rest and find their game faces again, so the blog is rejoining the world.

First game Thursday at home against Wisconsin Lutheran. Stay tuned.


We have been working hard all week and staying hydrated

The rookies are all extremely enthusiastic


Game Face