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!