2-1 and Learning

Well, the "easy" first part of our schedule is complete and while the loss was ugly and disappointing there is little question that every game has been a little better than the last. I suppose that's really all you can ask of a team. And maybe it was inevitable that with 9 new players and some veterans in unfamiliar positions we would have a rough first outing...Let's blame the coaches for that one and move on.

An outsider looking at our game scores and stat sheets would no doubt be confused. How did we end up with three times the number of corner kicks as our opponent and still score 5 goals less than they did? How did we lose 5-0 on Friday and win 11-0 just two days later?  How did Anya go two years without a goal and then score two in two minutes?  Who are all these freshmen who keep picking up goals? Who is this Emily Keast who plays all these minutes but rarely appears on the score sheet?

Now some of these questions are simply unanswerable, part of the grand mystery of soccer, and can be ignored unless it happens repeatedly. Some are easily answerable-- Anya had a position change from defense to midfield, Emily Keast can run forever, is extremely reliable, and tends to give the ball that sets up the assist--one that stat sheets don't recognize. The rookie class this year has really great players with a good array of gifts: some speed, some grit, some savvy, some aggressiveness. We too are just getting to know their off-the-field quirks and on-the-field talent. More to come on this. So far we know that Mickey can whistle just about any song, Holly is confused by charts and graphs, Ellen has a tendency to talk to herself/confuse herself, Nicole chews on the collar of her shirt when she is nervous, and Libby is looking to gain 20lbs of muscle by next year. Oh. And Elaina might be the fastest kid in the Midwest Conference. In any sport. The soccer coaches might just have to drive her to a few track meets this spring.

The Extended Forester Family

This morning, as I was leaving home to go pick up Coach Bell for practice, a cover version of "Here Comes The Sun" came on the radio. I had been thinking about yesterday's scrimmage and how good I was starting to feel about this year's team, and there was something about this song, coupled with the early morning sun and blue sky, that got me feeling pretty sentimental.

 We like to call our team a "family." The analogy being that just like family you don't have to be best friends, but you have to work to get along and work together and be respectful of one another even when you are all on the longest and most miserable of road trips. As the weeks here on campus go on and summer is in the the rearview mirror, it becomes easier to forget that we all have other (real) families who worked hard to raise every one of our kids (if you're the Schleibingers you had to raise two) and send them to this school to study and play soccer.

 Yesterday our teammate Becky Esrock played in her first full-field outdoor game since 2010. Last year she went home to St. Louis before our first scrimmage because her mom and brother had been in a terrible car accident the night before. Jon spent some weeks in the hospital but eventually recovered. Jan Esrock though, did not survive the accident. Becky spent the rest of the semester at home helping her family recover while her Forester Family did our best to play the season without her.

 My first memorable encounter with Jan Esrock is one I think of often these days. It was early in Becky's freshman season and we were playing a game in downstate Illinois. We were winning at every aspect of the game except where it mattered--on the scoreboard. At halftime, tied 0-0, TR had wandered out onto the field to try to give the team a bit of a pep talk, and I was milling around near the bench not doing anything. Jan, who I had only met briefly, yelled my name from just off the field. I wandered over and Jan exchanged brief pleasantries and handed me a shoebox with some cleats for her daughter. "Could you give these to Becky please? Maybe she'll be able to finally score if she changes cleats." I looked up at her face, expecting to see a smile and a wink to show she was joking. She was absolutely not. She was as irritated and exasperated as TR and I, if not more. I later learned that she too was a coach. The Jan Esrock I met that day was not a mom, or a math teacher--she was Coach Esrock, and she was unhappy.

 Looking at Becky on the field these days it's hard not to see her mom in her. It's a poignant reminder that we all carry our families and our parents around with us everywhere we go. Maybe it's in our mannerisms, or the way we run, maybe it's our attitude, or competitiveness that we got from our dad, or the goofy snorting laugh that we inherited from mom. Maybe it is more subtle than that, but it's there. Wherever they are and whatever they are doing, we carry these extended Forester Families out onto the field with us.

I'd like to think that even the ultra-competitive Jan Esrock would be pretty pleased with Becky's play yesterday. I'd like to think that all the parents of all our kids are proud of how hard they have worked this past week, how well they are coming together as a group, how much they have improved as individuals even over this relatively short time span, and how much fun they can have even sweaty and bent over at the waist after a tough drill.

 I have a feeling we are going to do good things this year; and we will be bringing our families, our moms and dads, brother and sisters, along for the ride.

The photo above is of Becky with her mom and two younger brothers, Joe and Jon, celebrating Becky's first soccer trophy. If anyone else has a similar picture, displaying just how long their daughter has been working at this game, please send it along. I would love to post them in this same space as a tribute both to them and to you. kimgeisergk at hotmail dot com

Jog To The Beach

A needed morning "off" meant that the team walked to nearby Lake Michigan to soak their tired legs. While there they enlisted some poor stranger to take their picture. Looking good ladies. Looking good. (Although I think Libby has her eyes closed)

Move-In Day

The first day of preseason is both the best and worst day of the year. On the one hand we finally get to be back with teammates after a summer of training alone. We get to fist bump and share stories of summer adventures. We reunite with familiar faces and get to meet the new ones. On the other hand, we do nothing. We move in, get dinner, get physicals, and walk into town. It's a lot of hurry up and wait, a lot of counting the minutes until practice begins the following morning. It's the worst. But it's also the best. Some photos from our team dinner and get-to-know-each-other session on the first day.

Spread The Word

A excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal article:

 But players and coaches say the game is still largely an exercise in chaos. Soccer has been played in pretty much the same form for close to 150 years. It is now at a point where every responsible way of deploying 11 players has been exhausted. 

Juanma Lillo, a former coach in Spain's La Liga, is seen as a soccer swami for pioneering the 4-2-3-1 formation that has been used by six of the 16 teams at the Euro. He says the whole notion of formations is "overvalued" in a sport that still basically boils down to 22 players chasing a ball across the field. "I would like to demystify this," Lillo said. "The formation is only the first snapshot. After that, the players are always on the move because the ball is on the move, so the formation no longer exists. In any case, [a team's] style of play is related to an idea, not to a geographic positioning on the pitch." 

Alexi Lalas, the former U.S. international who played in Italy's Serie A, supposedly the most sophisticated league in the world, said that formations are a suggestion for spacing, but little more than that. Once the match starts, teams take a quick glance at how their opponent is lined up and adjust, but give little thought to the numbers after that. Formations give players an idea of how they might want to view themselves on the field, but they're never a decisive factor in the game.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304782404577490652688623764.html

Finding A Way To Watch Soccer

There is no question that watching soccer is a fairly fun and easy way to improve one's own game. Even 15 minutes spent watching the way a professional forward breaks down a tough defense can lead to a goal or two against the less rigorous defenses we play against in the Midwest Conference. Of course, the World Cup is a worldwide phenomena and it is really easy to spend time watching games when the soccer world is chock full of Cup-craziness. This summer is obviously not a World Cup year but that doesn't mean there's is a dearth of viewing opportunities.

 First of all, there is always MLS. Heading to a Chicago Fire game or catching your local team whether live or on tv is obviously the easiest option for many of us. And you can eat stadium food while you're there! Mmmm, hot dogs.

 This summer though we have two large tournaments that will air in the United States. The opening rounds of the European Championships have begun and are being aired on ESPN. This tourney is World Cup style with the top two teams from Groups A-D advance to a single elimination format. The Championship game is being played on July 8 I believe.

 Later in the summer the London Olympics will begin. The men's tournament here is basically an under-23 tourney, with each team granted a couple of waivers for older players to join the young squad. So if you want to see David Beckham run around with some 20 year olds, this might be your shot. The women's side, however, is basically wide open, so you will see the full-strength national teams on the field.

All the American stars besides Ali Krieger, who is rehabbing an ACL, are currently scheduled to play. Hope Solo, Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, et al should be back on the field and hoping to avenge their World Cup loss with a Gold Medal victory. Watch. Watch. Watch. And watch some more. It is impossible not to learn from watching the best players in the world give their all on the pitch for weeks at a time.

Because we love our teammates

This might seem a little cheesy, but we all know what our teammates mean to us. The ones we currently have and the ones we grew up playing with, the ones we hung out with off the field, and the ones who drove us nuts on the field, the talented ones, the hardworking ones, the ones who made us laugh or hugged us when we cried. Each one of us has countless stories about the crazy, goofy, ridiculous people we see every afternoon and who we share more with than our families and un-athletic friends. And to those of us who have lost a teammate, we know the emptiness that remains in their place--as if the roster is perpetually one short.

Even when the sadness over the loss fades that emptiness is still there. And for that reason, the soccer team participated in Ry's Run last week. Ry's Run is one of those tribute events we use to remember and fill that emptiness.

A couple years ago, the women's hockey team lost Ryan McCarthy, one of its best teammates, to cancer. Every spring since the athletes at Lake Forest College have run a 5k in her memory. And as she would have wanted, they have a great time doing it.

We've Come A Long Way, Sort Of

Anyone who has ever won a big game recognizes this look and knows this feeling

I spent the last two nights watching the final game of the men's and women's NCAA Tournament. I have to admit to the fact that I have never been a women's hoops fan. I played myself in high school but have always dismissed the women's game as being slower, duller, and generally just far less fun to watch. I have always been a little ashamed to confess that, but there it is. But this Final Four felt different and was certainly more entertaining. Baylor's dominance, the guard play of Skylar Diggins and Odyssey Sims, Stanford's suffocating defense and intelligent team-play, and yes, the 6'8" Brittney Griner affecting every aspect of every game, grabbed me. Baylor is the best team in a game that suddenly has a plethora of very good teams; and yet Twitter, Facebook, and even the opposing coaches, are full of comments about Griner being "manly" "a man" "more of a man than Chris Bosh" and suddenly I have become very protective of a game I have not previously cared about. In a way, it feels like a change in the women's game reminiscent of the change that occurred in women's soccer following the 1996 Olympics, one that I got to witness first hand.

Olympic ticket buying is a tricky business. You have to purchase them months and months before the fact, before you even really know which teams/individuals are qualifying for certain events. My extended family had decided to convene at my aunt's house in Georgia for the games, but the various families were all purchasing their own tickets to whichever events they were interested in. We had decided to all attend one medal event together and I was arguing for a sport that had just been added to the Olympics that year--women's soccer.

My family was not and are not soccer fans. My parents were the ones who brought their books and newspapers to my high school games and clapped whenever someone kicked the ball really far. My extended family was even less familiar with soccer than that. Gymnastics and men's basketball (Dream Team II) were the events that people wanted to attend. No, I said, this is the game to see, the US Women are going to be in the gold medal game and they are going to win. My vehemence coupled with the fact that it was being played 10 minutes from where we were all staying meant that I won, though not without some grumbling from uncles and cousins.



I remember seeing lots of other events during the first week: track and field in the rain the morning after the bombing in Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta, a men's volleyball match that was so unexpectedly exciting my dad and I stood for the last game chanting "Pol-ska, Pol-ska, Pol-ska" with a large contingent of Polish fans dressed in red and waving flags, and a terrible early round women's basketball game. But mostly I searched NBC TV footage in vain for coverage of U.S. Women's Soccer.


The U.S. was playing pretty well in the early pool play rounds, but an unknown team, an unfamiliar sport, the fact that it was Women (which implied less skill and speed), and a small tournament (only eight teams in this initial go at the Olympics), meant that NBC didn't cover the team AT ALL. There were no cameras at the games, no highlights at the end of the night, very little, if any, mention by Bob Costas or the other studio announcers. The World Wide Web was in its infancy, dial up modems were loud and slow and the only thing available, Google was years off. Newspaper box scores were what I used to follow the team as the worked their way to the semi-final game. They were winning and they were invisible. Completely invisible.



My aunt surprised me by buying two tickets on the street for the semi-final games at the Georgia Bulldogs storied football field. (The hedges were removed for the soccer events). We sat and watched China beat Sweden and the U.S. beat Norway in OT for a berth to the gold medal game. There were close to 50,000 screaming yelling crazy awesome fans at the game, but when the two of us got home, ecstatic and drained from a day of intense soccer, no one there knew the results yet. Not only was the game not available anywhere on TV but the results hadn't been announced.

Three days later, with next to no coverage, the United States met China in the first gold medal women's soccer game ever. The streets of Athens were filled with fans. Brianna Scurry, the starting goalkeeper, had been so impressed by the support of fans she promised to run naked through the streets of Athens if the Americans won.* My cousins and I painted flags on our nails, my mom wore a Dr. Suess looking felt hat with red, white, and blue stripes, Chinese fans waved enormous flags and beat drums and ate rice balls they carried into the stadium in their fanny packs.

*Apparently she did run naked through the streets, though she waited until early morning when they were finally empty of fans

The game was incredible. It came down to the very end of regulation. Michelle Akers, the American's star midfielder, was so exhausted that she had to be carried off the field and get an IV in the locker room before the final whistle. The stadium was so loud I remember shouting into my brother's ear and still not being heard. I had to write "sudden death, then PKs" on my hand with a pen from my aunt's purse, to tell him what would happen if it ended in a tie. Finally, Shannon McMillan, who had scored a golden goal against Norway to put them in the final, scored another one, and victory was ours.

The stadium of 76,000+, at that time the largest crowd to ever watch a women's sporting event anywhere in the world, stayed to watch the medal ceremony, the US players running around the field with the flag slapping fans' extended hands, the Chinese players running out to clap and thank their fans and supporters. We got home, drained and elated and excited, and like sports fans everywhere we turned on the TV hoping to relive the event. This time Bob Costas mentioned the gold medal victory and showed some still photos, but because there had been no cameras at the field NBC was not able to offer any video highlights. If you weren't in the stadium in Georgia that night, you didn't see the game.



Hard to imagine now--when even a game being played in Japan at 3am local time is available on ESPN3 on demand or any sports bar can put GOLtv on in a corner for a paying customer to watch Sunderland lose on a Wednesday afternoon to Manchester City. And most sports fans recognize many of the names from that Gold Medal team: Michelle Akers, Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastian, Cindy Parlow, Tiffeny Milbrett, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly, Joy Fawcett, Carla Overbeck, and Shannon Macmillan. So in some ways soccer and women's sports have come have a very very long way since NBC ignored them in 1996.

In other ways, not so much. Last night I watched an incredible female athlete, a newly crowned champion, get called a man on national television, instead of simply congratulated for the hard work she put in all season and the physical beating she takes from opponents game in and game out. And last year, when we Foresters traveled to a school with a recently founded women's soccer program, we were not allowed to change or shower in a locker room because the women's locker area was being used to house the visiting football team. And so, we changed into our uniforms in the basement of a dorm while residents did laundry and gave us strange looks, and our post-game showering was done quickly and illicitly amongst football equipment while our teammates held off the teams streaming off the field.

Progress? Yes. Are you we done? No.

Global Warming Has Its Perks

Audra, Lisa, Emily, Courtenay, and Anya enjoying the unseasonably warm weather

After Courtenay missed a team workout, some of her teammates joined her for a make-up jog along beautiful Lake Michigan. Looks like a great day for a run.

The Offseason Part Deux

In the Midwest Conference our off-season has three pretty distinct parts. The first part is sandwiched awkwardly between the end of the season in November and finals/Christmas Break. It involves a lot of administrative tasks, the Awards Ceremony, decompressing from the season, and heading home for the holidays.

Part Two begins once the students return to campus for the second semester. It is largely player and captain organized and almost all of the responsibility lies with the individuals. The team gets together for optional runs, weight lifting, workouts, and pick-up games on our on-campus indoor turf. Some kids play on IM soccer teams too. Recently a group of 12 current players and alumnae got together and road-tripped to Madison. WI for a competitive Women's tournament over President's Weekend. It's in these months where the team really starts to set the tone for what THEY want out of the next season: they can motivate themselves and their teammates to bigger and better things or they can slowly watch the winter slip past without much self-improvement at all. Whichever option they choose is usually pretty evident in Phase Three...

In March and April the coaching staff is allotted 20 hours to train with the team. This can take all sort of different forms: working in small groups on specific skills, playing full games, fitness, position-specific practices, etc...These sessions are scheduled based on player availability and desires and are far more sporadic than the everyday, full-team practices we have during the season. These sessions take us up right up to finals and the start of the summer holidays.

Every year it is surprising how quickly it all flies by and before we know it we'll be back on campus in August for the start of another season. Yay!