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