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
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