A Little About Appleton

This is a re-post of an entry written last year. Apologies to all for the laziness. Original material coming soon!

Your Foresters are heading north to Appleton, WI tomorrow morning to take on the Vikings of Lawrence University. Both teams are 2-0 in Conference headed into tomorrow, so it should prove to be a good game. It is certainly one in which we hope to come away with a victory, but the Vikings have been a tough opponent for us I'm recent years.

 Some facts about Appleton and Lawrence:

 --Harry Houdini spent his childhood there after being born in Hungary.

 --The actor Willem Dafoe (played the Green Goblin in Spiderman) was raised there and began his acting career at a local community theater.

 --Lawrence is the second oldest co-ed college in the country, having admitted women a year after Oberlin College began doing so. Lawrence was chartered and founded in 1847, a year before Wisconsin became a state.

 --Actor Campbell Scott, son of George C. Scott, is an LU alum; as is Terry Moran from ABC's Nightline; and Jeffrey Jones, who played the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

 --John Bradley, one of the men in the famous photo (and subsequent statue) of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, grew up in Appleton and was a graduate of Appleton West High School. After the war he returned there and raised a family.

 --Sen. Joseph McCarthy began his political career in Appleton and is buried in a local cemetary.

 --If you find yourself in Appleton and notice a not-so-great odor it is, no doubt, the paper mills along the Fox River. Appleton is a center of the U.S. paper industry--Kimberly Clark and others are located nearby.

 --The Hearthstone House, now a local museum, was the first residence in the world to be powered by an Edison hydroelectric station. Appleton also was the first community in the national to have an electrically powered street car, was home to the first telephone hook-up in Wisconsin, and the first incandescent light bulb outside the east coast.

 --Lawrence University is named after its founder, Amos Lawrence, a Boston philanthropist and abolitionist. Lawrence, Kansas is named after his family as well.

Parents' Weekend

There are lots of great things about having kids from all over the country on our team. One of the disadvantages of course, is that our kids' families are unable to make it to the majority of our games. For that reason we always pick a weekend when we have two home games and designate it as "Parents Weekend."

It provides a great opportunity for our parents to see their daughter play, to mingle with the other parents in the bleachers and join in some Forester cheers, and the presence of their parents almost always means that our kids play with a little extra energy.

This weekend was no different. We had two games under beautiful end-of-summer blue skies, picked up two victories, everyone had an opportunity to play and show their parents how hard they have been working, and the kids had the chance following the game to meet their friend's parents and get taken out to some nice meals too.

Thanks to the parents who made the trip and to those who couldn't: you were missed! Above is a photo we took at halftime of the Grinnell game with the families and players. All of our parents will soon be receiving a copy in the mail.

Whether you can make it or not we always know you are cheering for us! Thank you so much for your love and support.

The Part That Matters

There is no question that we want to win. The question is really: does winning matter? Sure, it's more fun, the bus ride home is more pleasant, the coaches less grumpy; but a year from now, two years from now, heck, even two months from now, does it REALLY matter? Maybe, maybe not. Sure working together and learning to work with different people in pursuit of a common and larger goal is worthwhile, but does it matter if the end result is victory?

Without question what does matter is the stuff we do off the field, the classes we attend, the discussions we have, the books we read, the opinions we form and alter and re-form. These are the things that will change our lives and (just maybe) the lives of others.

Here are some Foresters working together, independently, in the library--a place where the stuff that always matters, happens.

Some Shots of The Bench

Here, the team completely ignores Ellen as she walks off the field. 

Holly is disgusted that Becky has copied her headband. Or something. I'm not sure how to interpret that look.

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.