How To Sleep On A Bus, by The Team

Letter from an alum

Lisa Sorensen, who was a member of our Midwest Conference Championship team last year, was asked to write a letter this year to the men's team as they prepared for the conference tourney. She wrote them this:

Boys, 

When asked to talk to you all about my experience of going to the NCAA tournament I was excited because I really love talking about it.  If you were to ask Charlie, he would probably say he hears about how amazing it was more times then he would like.  That is because the experience is nearly impossible to describe.  I guess if I had to sum it up into one sentence, I would say it is really a once in a life time opportunity.  

When I was a rookie, I came into camp not even having the NCAA tournament a thought in my mind.  I didn't really think that it was something that was even feasible for our women's team because it has only happened one other time in school history.  We made it to the conference tournament that year and didn’t get past the first round.  It bothered me but I thought to myself that I have 3 more years, no big deal.  Again, my sophomore year we lost the first round, but again I had two more years.  My junior year we didn’t even qualify for the tournament and I thought that I blew my chances the first two years.  Then senior year came around and we set the goal of going to the NCAAs.  Our season played out like yours, where a team that shouldn’t have beaten us in regular season did and I thought that the hopes of hosting had gone down the drain.  However, we ended up being conference champs and hosting the tournament.    During the second half of the championship game I will never forget when my coach yelled at me with about 15 min left saying to run faster to get back on defense.  I literally wanted to punch her in the face because I felt as though I had given everything that I could the entire game, but then she continued to yell saying that if I rest now, I'll also be resting when St. Norbert was going to the NCAA's the next weekend or I could dig deep and work harder and rest tomorrow on our day off.  It was then I realized that we could actually be going to the NCAAs.  We ended up winning and from that moment those indescribable feelings began.  

I still had no idea what to expect when I knew we were headed to the NCAA's, TR just kept giving me his generic response saying that it is a lot of fun.  I thought that the overnight road trip once a season was fun and thought it would be similar.  However it is completely different.  The road to the NCAA's began with the drawings of the bracket.  I remember watching the drawings for the NCAA in the Dau room as a team. The feelings of excitement and anticipation of where we will be playing and who our opponent was unreal. I had the biggest butterflies waiting for Lake Forest College to appear on TV.  Each time they moved on to the next team you just hope that your next so you can finally know who you are playing and where.  We ended up drawing a team from Minnesota but playing in Iowa… I had never been more excited to going to Iowa in my life.  

The weekend of the tournament is by far the best weekend I had at Lake Forest College.  The day we left for the NCAA tournament was also something special. I felt like the Women's soccer team was the most important thing on campus.  All of the other teams, coaches, and the athletic department is there escorting you off, even Public Safety literally escorted our bus to the highway.  As weird as that sounds it felt pretty awesome knowing that everyone was watching us go wishing it was them who was on that bus.  Also, there are many perks of the NCAA paying for your trip which is very nice… The hotel you stay at is so much nicer, you all get your own bed and they are WAY more comfortable beds then what you get on the one away trip of the season.  The food is by far way better. We never had a price limit, (although we were told not to go crazy) but I did have a 4 course meal one night.  When game day comes you feel like someone important the moment you step off the bus. You get a badge that allows you in certain places no one else can go and get all the treatment that you need/want with out hesitation.  Most importantly the memories you make as a team literally will last forever.  When talking about it to others I find myself saying over and over again that it was just an amazing experience that is so hard to describe that I will never forget.  

Looking back over my four years of playing, I feel very lucky to be a part of a team who has been to the NCAAs. Going back to what Kim yelled at me during the conference final game about running faster makes me realize that it is SO worth it to work as hard as possible and never give up during the games you are about to play in this weekend. Whether you play the full 90, a few minutes, or not at all, whether you have 3 more years ahead of you or its your last season, the time that you do play, or even spend cheering on your teammates is very important when playing for a spot in the NCAA tournament.  You never know if the opportunity will come again.  It's only been done a few times for the men's team in school history and to say that you are one of the teams who got the opportunity to go is an amazing feeling.

Good luck this weekend and I can't wait to celebrate with you on Saturday.

Lisa

Tourney Time!

We leave campus today at 3pm and play Monmouth College tomorrow in De Pere at 11am. The winner advances to the Conference Championship at 6pm on Saturday and plays the winner of the St. Norbert/Grinnell game. All games should be streaming through the St. Norbert website. Go to the schedule page here and click on our game. Most of all--WISH US LUCK!

Thanks for your support all season long! See ya in De Pere. 

Halloween

Due to extremely wet weather and our range of injuries we spent the hilarious Halloween practice indoors for the first time in recent memory. While this kept us dry, it also meant that we all got a little warm pretty early and didn't spend much time in full costume. I had to work hard to try to capture everyone in the first 15 minutes.

The giraffe and the zookeeper checking out the tennis players and the stripped down Batman across the circle

Harry Potter gazes longingly at the team, wishing she knew a spell to cure her concussion

Just horsin' around

The hula girl and tennis players are in character. I suppose the giraffe is too. 

A couple superheroes who are braving the heat. The Fat Cat got warm and stripped off her costume. She is fixing her shoes above. They have a tendency to come untied. 

Blades of Glory and our Hula Girl

Conference Tournament Time!

Well, it's official. The Lake Forest Foresters are the #3 seed in the upcoming Midwest Conference Tournament to be held in De Pere, WI just outside Green Bay at St. Norbert College.

We still have one more regular season game to play against a team that will not be participating in the Tournament. This game still means something for a few reasons:

1) Lawrence University will most likely play hard--it would be a nice end to their season to beat the current Conference Champions on their own turf.

2) Its our last game before heading to De Pere the following Friday. We want to set a tone for ourselves. If we could duplicate the energy and movement we played with against Lawrence last season we would set ourselves up well going into our Tournament week.

3) Lawrence is Coach Geiser's alma mater. She ALWAYS wants to beat them handily (but respectfully).

A few more photos

Two shots of the emerging autumn colors on Old Elm road last week. I think this week is probably better but I don't have a more recent one. Perhaps I'll have a chance to get one this afternoon. 

 Michelle "Mickey" Greeneway is one of three Foresters (Nina Perkkio and Holly "Little Giant" Lesperence being the other two) who play two sports. Unfortunately the end of soccer season and the beginning of hockey season overlap, meaning that they are often attending two practices a day or playing a couple games over the course of the weekend. By the end of last week this had taken a toll and when the ball bag got emptied so the players could begin to warm up, Mickey took the opportunity to crawl inside of it and take a nap on some pinnies, using the cones as a pillow.

 Some nice fall color in the Benedictine University parking lot on Wednesday evening. If you want to know what kind of tree this is you'll have to ask Mr. Hillis. Apparently New Englanders study these kinds of things.

Lucky for you parents, this weekend is our annual PARENTS WEEKEND and you will have an opportunity to discuss trees and naps with both Mr. Hillis and the Greeneways. There will be adult beverages and all kinds of tasty food in the parking lot before our Saturday game. Please join our greatest fans for some snacks and mingling before our noon kickoff.

Lincoln and Locomotives

For those of you who have been on pins and needles regarding the over/under prize-less "bet" on number of minutes spent waiting for a train to pass in Galesburg....the overs won. We arrived within Galesburg city limits, drove past a few gas stations and bars, and then spent 12 minutes waiting for a train. This train in fact:

As for the "Lincoln" part of this post, it again has to do with Knox and its proud tradition. I have written about this before here but I'll repost the pertinent paragraphs (to get info on the asterisks you'll have to go to the original posting): 

 In 1858, a previously little-known circuit lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was running for the United States Senate against the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas. Douglas was a Democrat who had earned the nickname "Little Giant"* because although he was quite short, he was a forceful speaker and a dominant figure in politics. Lincoln was running as a Republican, a party that had just recently been established in Ripon, WI, a primary plank of their platform being that slavery should not spread beyond its current borders.**

Two years before the Civil War these two candidates met seven times all over the state in a series of intense debates, now known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. One candidate would speak for 60 minutes, then the other for 90 minutes, and then the first would have 30 minutes to reply. On October 7, 1858, they met at Knox College, on a temporary stage outside their Old Main classroom building*, where Douglas publicly stated that the Declaration of Independence was not meant to apply to non-whites. "The Government was made by our fathers on the white basis...made by white men for the benefit of white men and their prosperity forever." Lincoln, on the other hand, perhaps comforted by the abolitionist spirit of Knox College and Galesburg, took the opportunity to announce for the first time, his moral opposition to the institution of slavery.

Following our game on Saturday I took a quick tour of the Knox campus and found Old Main, which has two large plaques posted outside its door celebrating the great debate and its participants. A current student filled me in on the crawling-out-the-window story that I had heard. Looking at the front of the building below you can see the green doors, the two plaques on either side of it (Lincoln to the left, Douglas on the right), and the large window to the left of the door. 

Apparently, the debate was held just in front of this building. A large platform had been erected across the face of it that was high enough to block the door and part of the windows. Each candidate had been given a room inside the building to relax and prepare for the debate, and when the time came to take the stage,  Douglas, understanding that he couldn't walk out the front directly onto the stage, went out the back and walked around the building and up some steps to the debate platform. Lincoln, in a moment that historians and forensic psychologists could probably spend weeks dissecting, simply opened the window nearest to him, and climbed out onto the platform. All six foot, four inches of him.  

The famous window

In our current political climate, YouTube footage of this event would have been almost immediately available on Twitter and whatever cable news station was for States' Rights would have ridiculed this gangly, awkward, country bumpkin who taught himself to read by firelight from borrowed books. Alternatively he would be accused of trying to appear folksy and common when really he was lawyer who didn't at all understand what a farm laborers life was like. He would have not only lost the 1858 Senate election in Illinois but likely wouldn't have made it as a candidate for President in 1860 and our world may be very different than it is today. I've thought about this moment all week and I've decided that I like the folksiness of it. I like the lack of pretension it shows. Again, he probably didn't even spend two seconds debating whether to go out the window or all the way around the building and here I am discussing it on a soccer blog in 2013! 

To Galesburg and Beyond

An actual Prairie Fire

Well, its here. The cold weather, the meat of our season, the games that ALWAYS matter, and the Pumpkin Spice Latte.

The Foresters have been big fans of the PSL ever since it was introduced in 2004/05. Perhaps it is all the time spent outdoors together in Autumn, but it is almost always a topic of discussion among the players. This year's team has decided that the PSL available at Panera is by far the best. More to come on this important topic soon.

The weather has certainly gotten chillier recently. Last week's sunny and 70s has given way to gloomy and 50s. Shorts weather appears to have come and gone along with the evening light. The sun is setting noticeably earlier these days and warm up jackets are a fixture at practice. The good news is that it appears the sun will be shining in Galesburg tomorrow for our fixture with The Knox College Prairie Fire. I have written more extensively on the proud egalitarian tradition of Knox College in past years so, on the off chance you are interested, please go here and look at a post from last year.

Really, to the players, the most noticeable part of a trip to Galesburg is the frequency with which the team bus gets trapped behind trains. The town, which has long been a crossroads for railroad traffic, is littered with train tracks, and when you combine that with a typically cautious bus driver (which I am in NO WAY complaining about), you get quite a few minutes of our lives spent in Western Illinois waiting for trains to pass through. The over/under on minutes spent waiting tomorrow is 7. I will report back.

So, after Knox we have a mid-week non -conference game in the western suburbs, followed by a HUGE home-stand against Illinois College and Monmouth. IC has played most teams in the conference really tough this year and, as of right now, Monmouth is ahead of us in the rankings with just one loss in conference. Two wins would be great for us but I don't want to look ahead too far. For more on rankings and record go to the Midwest Conference website.

I'm not sure that video will be available from the field but our game is at 1pm and if I remember I'll post an update on Twitter. Follow us at @LFCfutbol

For those of you interested:

Weightlifting: Trying a new approach

In the past few years the coaches have worked to get the team in the weight room a couple times a week, thinking that the more the kids are comfortable in there the more likely they are to go on their own during the offseason. This year, for a few reasons, it was clear that it just wasn't working very well for us. Our strength and conditioning coordinator suggested a new approach and so far it appears to be working out. Thanks Blake!

Autumn is here...almost

A few updates from the last 10 days on Green Bay Road. The color isn't there yet but the trees are definitely thinning. 

Technology: Blerg

Notice the six or so phones stacked in the middle of the table at Mongolian Barbeque. Yay!

While Coach Bell and I don't always feel very old, there are ways in which our college experience was VASTLY different from that of the current team. For one, there were no cell phones and the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Google didn't exist. If we wanted to search the web we used AltaVista or maybe Yahoo. We used Lexus Nexxus to find articles and Interlibrary Loan to get our hands on a discontinued volume.

If my friends wanted to get a hold of me in the library and didn't feel like walking over there and up to my 5th floor cubicle they would simply call the front desk, say it was urgent, and get the librarian to page me over the intercom. I usually knew when I heard "Kim Geiser, you have an urgent phone call at the desk" overhead that my friend Beth wanted to meet at the Union for a grilled cheese. After a big game at Grinnell my senior year I called my parents collect at their home from a roadside pay phone to tell them we had lost.

I don't particularly lament the loss of Alta Vista. I don't really miss having to rely on pay phones. I am sure the librarians at my Alma Mater do not miss paging students to the front desk for urgent grilled cheese sandwiches. But Coach Bell and I talk often about how different our road trips were.

If there was a movie on the bus, we all watched it because we didn't have our own personal screens to catch up on last season's Grey's Anatomy while our seat-mate typed a paper on her laptop. Back in the day I would pack my Discman and my travel CD folder that held about 10 albums. After listening to G. Love and Special Sauce a couple times over the course of the weekend I was more than happy to talk to my bus neighbor about the defensive breakdown we had in the 57th minute and how to prevent it next time. After a tough loss we couldn't get on the bus and complain to our parents or our roommate about how terrible the midfield had been--you either sat scowling silently in your seat or you talked to your teammates about what had happened. Your teammates were all you had on those trips. If you had a question about homework you had to ask them. If you wanted to laugh you had to laugh with them. If you wanted to cry you used one of their shoulders. These days, the bus is completely silent. Everyone sits in their seat with their laptop or iPad open and their headphones on, lost in their own little world.

That's why it was nice to see some of the kids all place their cell phones in the middle of the table at team dinner and talk to each other. One of those things that we used to take for granted is now a nice change.

Catching Up

So the blog has been a little quiet lately because I have found myself busy and idea-less. That does not mean that things aren't happening, just that creatively I am not feeling inspired.

Obviously we had a tough loss against St. Norbert two Saturdays ago. During the week following we had 3 of the best days of practice we had had all year. The coaches were really pumped to go into Ripon and make a statement. And we did. Sort of. We went up 3-0 in the first half, gave up one to go into halftime at 3-1, and then apparently decided having a lead was dull so we gave up two more to the home team. Eventually we managed to get a couple more to end the game 5-3 but it's the kind of game that gives coaches grey hairs and ulcers. Hopefully we can keep those to a minimum going forward.

This week we are trying to recapture the work ethic that we displayed in those practices last week and continue to play were a little verve and elan. A night game on the road during the week is not usually our most comfortable milieu, but we are going to fight and claw and SCORE against Carroll and see what happens.

Please tune in to see our game even if you can't make it Waukesha to watch us in person!

Always a big game against the Green Knights

We have one more short practice before the Green Knights arrive at Farwell Field tomorrow for our third conference game of the season. If you aren't sure whether or not this is a big game you were not with us last year. Last year, in our regular season meeting in Green Bay the Foresters went up 2-0 and the game ended in an exhausting back-and-forth OT in which neither team could wrangle a goal. Final score: 2-2. Our second meeting was in the Conference Championship last November and was much more close and tense than our eventual 2-0 score would indicate. For both of these games it was pretty cold. Tomorrow it is supposed to be 80 degrees on the turf. Not sure that that helps or hurts either one of us more than the other, but it will be a welcome change from
the 2 layers of Under Armor and long underwear I had on last year.

If you would like to catch up on the history of St. Norbert College and St. Norbert himself please go here. A little about our regular season match up last year is here. As always, if you are looking for the more "official" version please visit goforesters.com.

For the long distance fan: the official Lake Forest College Forester website is also the place to go if you are looking for game video. If you are a local or are going to be in town please stop by the Greeneway's tailgate beginning at 11am. God bless those folks from Wisconsin. They sure know how to throw a parking lot party. Or a hotel lobby party for that matter.

Green Bay Road, an update

Head Coach TR Bell has a lovely keychain 

As promised, two updated photos of my drive up to Lake Forest. I feel like the leaves are thinning a bit...

Prairie Pioneers

Today we head to Grinnell, Iowa, a town of 9000 to play the Grinnell College Pioneers tomorrow. Grinnell College was founded in 1846 and is now one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. It is also in the middle of a lot of corn and not much else.

Grinnell is one of two schools in our conference that call themselves the “Pioneers.” Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin is the other one. So now, a little about Pioneers in Iowa.

The first official white settlement in Iowa began in 1833 in land taken from Chief Blackhawk and the Sauk during the Black Hawk War of 1832 (Abraham Lincoln joined fought the Sauk during this war as he was living in Illinois at the time.) Most of Iowa’s first white settlers came from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Kentucky, and Virginia in family units. What they discovered was land far different than that further east. Most of the land in the eastern United States was heavily forested. Naturalist John Madson wrote: “It is said that grey squirrel could travel inland from the Atlantic Coast for nearly a thousand miles and never touch the ground.”

By the time settlers reached northern Illinois and Iowa, however, they had left the forests behind and entered the American prairies—huge swathes of treelass grasslands that covered the middle and western portions of the country. Settlers depended on the forests for building homes, barns, fences, and providing fuel for warmth and cooking. Without trees they were reduced to building sod houses and living like moles.

Not only that but grasses in parts of Iowa could grow to 7-8 feet high. Cattle would get lost. Prairie fires were a constant danger as one lightning strike could start of wall of flames that would sweep through the dry grass and overtake anything in its path. Even plowing was different and more difficult than it had been in the east. The roots of the native grasses were so tough that it could take 3-4 teams of oxen to plow them up on a new farm. Even once plowed initially by oxen the pioneers had issues as the rich Iowa soil clung to their traditional iron plows and soon the plow would be mired in mud in a field. An Illinois blacksmith by the name of John Deere invented a steel plowshare that was smooth enough that the soil fell from it instead of clinging. It made plowing much much easier and made John Deere into a brand recognized worldwide.

By 1870 the lumber problem on the prairie had been solved by the railroads. The white pine forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin were chopped down, floated down rivers to sawmills along the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, and especially Chicago. Selling lumber to prairie farmers was so lucrative that Chicago boasted that it had more millionaires per population than any other city in the country.

By 1880 there were settlers from the Mississippi River to the Missouri river and the pioneer days were over. Many families had begun their Iowa farms growing and selling wheat, which they ground into flour for baking or shipped it down the rivers. But because wheat was so heavy, it was costly to transport and farmers soon discovered that they could earn more growing corn. They would feed the corn to hogs and sell the hogs at market. (Again Chicago was a huge part in this and became known as the “hog butcher to the world.)

It only took about 40 years for the prisitine prairies of the Native Americans to be covered in small farms. Most of the native plants disappeared and were replaced by corn, which now we get to drive through for five hours on our way west. 

Luckily, tomorrow we do not have to spend our time at the sawmill buying fence posts, or sweeping out the sod house, or sod busting so we can grow corn to feed our hogs. We get to play a game on some beautiful green grass out here on the wide open prairie. 

Pre-season Randomness

A lot goes on during preseason. The poor freshmen are going a mile a minute trying to digest all of it. All the names, all the new faces, all the new locations and traditions and procedures. They seem to be catching on, however, and are going to be a real asset to a team that accomplished a lot last year.

Here are a few pics of various and sundry things and people taken during the last week:

The drive I make everyday up from the city for practice includes this stretch of Green Bay Rd. in Lake Forest. It is usually one of my favorite parts of the day. Green, quiet, peaceful, and with gorgeous trees arching over the street. In the two and a half months of our season it changes pretty drastically. I am hoping to post a photo here once a week or so, so that all of you can follow the season along with me. 

Holly, Libby, Sam, and Emily Keast took some rookies into the city on Sunday. They trekked to the Lincoln Park Zoo, one of the largest free zoos in the country. Kyle, Amy, Cara, and Rachel had a wonderful time, I'm sure. 

Every year the college takes the Freshmen to the city for a day as a part of their First Year Studies course. The upperclassmen have usually made a point to get together on this day and enjoy a day without practice. As they did last year, today they journeyed to the Giurovici residence to enjoy the pool and lots and lots of food.

How many countries are in this country?

Forever Young

Ripon College midfielder Taylor Ziebol was killed in a car accident earlier this week. When I heard the news I immediately got a lump in my throat. Not because I knew Taylor, but because, as a coach, you send your kids home to their parents every spring knowing you'll see them again in August. To not have that be true, to have a hole in your lineup and your heart before the season even begins...well, it just made me feel horribly sad for the Redhawks family. Not to mention the Ziebols.

Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Before the lump faded my mind rewound to an August many years ago. Moments of it still stand so starkly in my memory that as I type this my heart is pounding. Four days before preseason began my junior year of college the phone rang in my apartment just as I was getting home from work. One of my best friends from high school had been killed in a car accident.

Thinking about it later that week one of the biggest surprises was that I didn't burst into tears. Instead I felt as if the reckless invincibility that had defined our teenage years evaporated in the span of a few sentences that began with "I don't know how to tell you this" and was replaced by a emptiness in my chest that immediately felt as if it would never go away. After four days at home in Minneapolis attending the funeral and seeing friends and not knowing what to say when my mom just looked at me and cried, I couldn't wait to get back to school and start the soccer season. I never had a feeling of dedicating the season to my friend (he was a swimmer and not really into sports that involved running around on land) but somehow I knew that the only thing that was going to make the emptiness in my chest go away was between the lines on that grass field. Class and studying were useless--I just couldn't concentrate, food tasted like paste, having a couple beers with friends just left me feeling sad and crying in some dorm room somewhere. But there was something about running around with my teammates, working together, that made the emptiness disappear most of the time. I started that season with an intensity I'd never felt before--I cried too often, and yelled at my teammates too harshly, but the field was the only place I found where I could feel anything close to "good" for weeks and weeks and weeks. Soccer stopped being fun to me and became necessary.

By the time that season ended the emptiness in my chest was mostly gone. My team had saved me. I don't think it's a coincidence that that winter I got serious about wanting to get a teaching degree and spend my afternoons and weekends coaching. That season taught me that team sports mean a lot more than just wins and losses and fun with friends. They can provide a lifeline and a family and a new focus just when a kid needs it most. If I have one wish for the Ripon Red Hawks this year it is that they find in their field the same imperfect sanctuary I found in mine.

I recently read that the parents of deceased children often simply wish for people to mention their kids' name. I know I spent months wishing someone would ask me about Lloyd so I could tell them how much he loved life, how goofy he was, how he was always doing ridiculous stuff like stealing a stoplight and then almost being electrocuted when he tried to hook it up in his parent's basement. Or about the summer morning he and two other friends picked me up at my house with an enormous red rubber ball they had bought at Target and we spent all day driving around Minneapolis dropping it off things--4 storey high parking ramps, Mississippi River Bluffs, warehouse roofs, and laughed all day about how stupid and fun it was. My friend's name was Lloyd Collins. He was named after his grandfather who outlived him.

Taylor Ziebol won't be on the field for the Red Hawks this year but I hope all of the teams in the Midwest Conference support the Ziebol family and the Ripon family and say her name this season. Acknowledge her absence and try to remember her presence. She was #25 for the Red Hawks. She grew up in Burnsville, MN, just south of Minneapolis. She was getting ready to return to Ripon for her sophomore year and rejoin her teammates on the field. Even though we never met her, we join the Red Hawks in missing her.

The Red Stars Meet The Foresters

Can you find the professional player?

On April 14 we were given the opportunity to work as sideline security at the Home Opener of the new NWSL Chicago Red Stars. Our teammates who were able to make it--about 15, got free fieldside seats in exchange for a little bit of pregame, halftime, and postgame work. The game ended in a tie but the Foresters got to meet the owner of the opposing Seattle Reign, see an amazing diving header goal from about 15 feet away, see team favorite Ella Masar get an assist on the Red Stars tying goal, and escort some of the players post game as they signed autographs. Just before the players headed back to the locker room our players managed to grab new Red Star and longtime National Team midfielder Shannon Boxx for a photo. A total honor and privilege. Good work team! And thanks to Shannon and the rest of the Red Stars for the opportunity. We'll be back!

For those interested in reading more here is a NYT article on the new league:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sports/soccer/national-womens-soccer-league-to-begin-play.html?_r=0

Foresters Helping Foresters (both past and future)

Last Saturday members of our team visited Top Soccer in a nearby suburb. Started by Lake Forest Soccer alum Shawn Danhouser after his son was diagnosed with autism, Top Soccer is a program for kids with cognitive disabilities. We stopped by for an afternoon and ran a clinic for some of the program participants. It was a lot of fun for all and certainly extremely rewarding for our team.

Let's Do Better In 2013

Forester Push-ups 2012

Third Time's The Charm?

This April the third iteration of a professional women's soccer league in the United States kicks off.

The history of professional women's sports in this country is relatively short and chock full of basically unsuccessful teams and leagues and organizations supported by small but enthusiastic fan-bases. Some of them, like the WNBA, are supported by their money-making brother organizations (see National Basketball Association). Others, like the 4-team National Professional Fastpitch league seem to be passion projects of owners who don't mind losing money in the name of sport. It is yet to be seen what the legacy of the NWSL will be.

In 2000, following the huge and unprecedented success of the 1999 Women's World Cup, the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA) was formed. It was the first women's league in the world in which all the players were paid as professionals. And paid they were. The WUSA folded in 2003 following the finish of its third season and posted cumulative losses of around $100 million. 

When the Women's Professional Soccer league started play in 2009 the conventional wisdom was that the lessons of over-spending had been learned during WUSA's run. But similar issues, and some wack-a-doodle owners (see Dan Borislaw and MagicJack), doomed WPS, which closed up shop following its third season and the loss of a few teams along the way.

Having never seen a WUSA game in person and not being a fan of the WNBA, I was skeptical of the need for and entertainment value of, a women's pro league here. Surely with our varied levels of intense competition at the college level, the huge success of the National Team, and the opportunity for American players to play overseas in Europe and Japan, we didn't need to go down that rabbit hole again. But when it was announced in late 2008 that Chicago would have a team in the WPS I found myself excited and wanting to support the league. It helped that I knew some rabid Chicago Fire fans who were buying season tickets for the Red Stars. It helped that they were going to play in the same soccer-only stadium that the Fire used. It also helped that my other go-to summer team--the Chicago Cubs, are consistently terrible and hard to watch. Soccer was just the thing.

Fast forward a few years to the start of the National Women's Soccer League...Here we are again. Putting huge amounts of time and money into an unproven venture. Is this worth it? Is it worth watching? Is it worth investing our limited free time in yet another team?

Having seen most of the the Red Stars home games from field-level as a game-day volunteer, getting the opportunity to witness the players behind the scenes, talking to fans young and old, and seeing the leaps and bounds that international players have made in catching up to the play of the United States National Team, I am more convinced than ever that we NEED a pro league. It doesn't have to play in front of 60,000 people in huge football stadiums, but we need it.

Girls need sports in their lives--or at least the CHANCE to have sports in their lives. And they need heroes and goals and things to aspire to and champions who look like them. And as a side-benefit, the National Team members will have the chance to play year-round in a domestic league. Newly graduated college players will have a chance to hone their skills alongside some of the best and get seen by National Team coaches. The quality of the USWNT pool improves immensely with a domestic league.

This time around, the structure is much more minimal than with the previous two leagues. The eight teams all have small front office staffs. The national soccer federations of Canada, the United States, and Mexico have agreed to pay the salaries of their participating national team players, thus removing the biggest salaries from the books of the individual teams. The league front office is scaled down from what it was with WUSA and WPS. The Chicago Red Stars, instead of having to pay for the right to play in the beautiful but too large Toyota Park, are starting smaller by having home games in the stadium at Benedictine College.

We'll see if it works. Mostly, the Foresters are happy to hear that team favorite Ella Masar is staying in Chicago to continue her career with the Red Stars.

To check out the league and find links to the eight teams--the Boston Breakers, the Chicago Red Stars, FC Kansas City, the Portland Thorns, the Seattle Reign (sweet logo), Sky Blue FC, Washington Spirit, and Western New York Flash, head here. I highly recommend Twitter as a way to follow the league, the teams, and the players. And if you're looking for independent journalistic commentary on women's soccer your best sources are All White Kit and The Equalizer.

A Belated Happy New Year From The Foresters

 

 2012 was a very good year for us. It was also a very fun year.  But our year is illustrative of a problem that is very common in sports: your team has a great year, a historic year, an amazingly fun year. And then it ends and there is barely time at all to bask in the glory before you want to start all over again, except do it EVEN BETTER this time. Work harder, be in better shape, play smarter, score that header you missed last year, be more supportive of your teammates, finish that breakaway, beat that team you lost to in overtime, dominate that team you hated playing, make that save you almost had, and above all win that last game and go even farther. 

Before that whole business starts up however, our players are busy this January. We have three kids playing hockey (two actively, one on the Disabled List but apparently she is doing an excellent job of opening the door from the bench to the ice), two kids coming off of surgeries and rehabbing, four kids spending the second semester overseas in Rome, Florence, London, and Beijing, and three seniors who are preparing for their last semester before graduation and the real world. 

Our spring season will start up in March and before that the team has to get back to campus, get back into the swing of classes, start up in the weight room again, play a little pick-up on the indoor turf, maybe even get their touch back in the racquetball courts (that might be a coach's wishful thinking), and get their legs churning on the treadmill (more wishful thinking?).

After the holidays this blog will be back with some more Forester news. Right now campus is empty and quiet and the team is scattered to their homes all over the country. Stay tuned. And be sure to check our official Athletic Department page to get updates on the off-season awards and accolades our kids have piled up. 

Happy New Year!