A little about growth, part 2

Double rainbow over Iowa

I don't think coaches are born nervous and superstitious, I think that happens after years of pinning your hopes and dreams to teenagers. Sometimes they surprise us in a good way, sometimes it's not so good--we just put on our lucky socks and hope for the best.

Going into the Monmouth game, lucky socks on, we knew all we had to do was play our brand of soccer and we'd come out with a win and the right to host the Tournament, something we hadn't done since 2004. But the lucky socks were powerless against the Monmouth Scots. They played hard and well, we played sorta a little bit hard and poorly. It was one of those "perfect storm" games when everything seems to go exactly wrong. I attributed it to nerves which lead to over-thinking which lead to brain cramps, but whatever it was we played badly. We had a few kids who had their worst game of the year, a few who just seemed listless and uninterested, and a few who clawed their way through the game but it just wasn't their day. Monmouth ran over us like we were squirrels and they were a Mack truck. The final score was 0-3 but it could easily have been 4 or 5.

Somehow we mentally recovered in the hotel that night and scraped together some second half goals to beat Illinois College the next day. For ten minutes following our Sunday win we stood around with cell phones in our hands waiting to hear who won the Grinnell/St. Norbert game. If it was GC, we'd most likely have to travel there for the Tournament, if it was SNC then we would host. It was an insane nail-biter with two PKs, but the Green Knights pulled out the win, meaning we were Midwest Conference Champions. It was the most anti-climactic way to win I could have imagined.

For the next two weeks I went had trouble sleeping. I would lie awake and wonder if we were going to display the same brain cramps we had against Monmouth in our semi-final game. Were we going to let team that wasn't as talented as us beat us at home? Were we going to have to sit around the rest of the weekend watching teams we had beaten in the regular season play for OUR trophy? What could the coaches do to snap the team out of it? It was maddening. Mostly because I never came up with an answer.

But after the first five minutes of the Grinnell game I knew I wasn't the one who had to come up with an answer. The players, these kids, had to do it themselves, and they had. They had figured out what happened against Monmouth and made sure it wasn't going to happen again. My nerves disappeared and didn't reappear for the rest of the season. Against St. Norbert the next day I was anxious to get started, anxious to finish once we got a lead, but I was never nervous about our kids and their ability to play well. All season TR and I knew that if we played hard, we'd play well, and if we played well, we were going to win. And at the most important, most pressure filled point in the season, our kids grew up. They weren't the nervous kids who had barely played the Monmouth game. They were the women who won the regular season trophy and the NCAA bid in the same season. The first group to do that in the long history of Lake Forest Women's Soccer.

They showed that same spirit, that same growth, against Concordia-Moorhead in Iowa. Playing a good team, with one of our forwards injured on the bench, we scored first to go up 1-0. That's growth. That's what sports are all about.

Someday, when this season is long in the rearview mirror, these kids are going to understand what they learned on the soccer field. And it certainly will have nothing to do with a ball.