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!

An art, not a science

There are countless ways to pass time on the bus, most of them involve trying to find a way to sleep.

Unless you're a secret genius. In which case, there is no time for sleep--there are problems to solve and songs to whistle.

A little about growth, part 2

Double rainbow over Iowa

I don't think coaches are born nervous and superstitious, I think that happens after years of pinning your hopes and dreams to teenagers. Sometimes they surprise us in a good way, sometimes it's not so good--we just put on our lucky socks and hope for the best.

Going into the Monmouth game, lucky socks on, we knew all we had to do was play our brand of soccer and we'd come out with a win and the right to host the Tournament, something we hadn't done since 2004. But the lucky socks were powerless against the Monmouth Scots. They played hard and well, we played sorta a little bit hard and poorly. It was one of those "perfect storm" games when everything seems to go exactly wrong. I attributed it to nerves which lead to over-thinking which lead to brain cramps, but whatever it was we played badly. We had a few kids who had their worst game of the year, a few who just seemed listless and uninterested, and a few who clawed their way through the game but it just wasn't their day. Monmouth ran over us like we were squirrels and they were a Mack truck. The final score was 0-3 but it could easily have been 4 or 5.

Somehow we mentally recovered in the hotel that night and scraped together some second half goals to beat Illinois College the next day. For ten minutes following our Sunday win we stood around with cell phones in our hands waiting to hear who won the Grinnell/St. Norbert game. If it was GC, we'd most likely have to travel there for the Tournament, if it was SNC then we would host. It was an insane nail-biter with two PKs, but the Green Knights pulled out the win, meaning we were Midwest Conference Champions. It was the most anti-climactic way to win I could have imagined.

For the next two weeks I went had trouble sleeping. I would lie awake and wonder if we were going to display the same brain cramps we had against Monmouth in our semi-final game. Were we going to let team that wasn't as talented as us beat us at home? Were we going to have to sit around the rest of the weekend watching teams we had beaten in the regular season play for OUR trophy? What could the coaches do to snap the team out of it? It was maddening. Mostly because I never came up with an answer.

But after the first five minutes of the Grinnell game I knew I wasn't the one who had to come up with an answer. The players, these kids, had to do it themselves, and they had. They had figured out what happened against Monmouth and made sure it wasn't going to happen again. My nerves disappeared and didn't reappear for the rest of the season. Against St. Norbert the next day I was anxious to get started, anxious to finish once we got a lead, but I was never nervous about our kids and their ability to play well. All season TR and I knew that if we played hard, we'd play well, and if we played well, we were going to win. And at the most important, most pressure filled point in the season, our kids grew up. They weren't the nervous kids who had barely played the Monmouth game. They were the women who won the regular season trophy and the NCAA bid in the same season. The first group to do that in the long history of Lake Forest Women's Soccer.

They showed that same spirit, that same growth, against Concordia-Moorhead in Iowa. Playing a good team, with one of our forwards injured on the bench, we scored first to go up 1-0. That's growth. That's what sports are all about.

Someday, when this season is long in the rearview mirror, these kids are going to understand what they learned on the soccer field. And it certainly will have nothing to do with a ball.

A little about growth, part I

Forester Kryptonite stored here

At the beginning of the season, within a day or two really, the coaches saw something special in this group. We had some kids who could score, some who would never stop working, some who showed good skills and coachability, some excellent on-the-ball defenders, some athletes, some speed, some upperclassmen with experience, some rookies with swagger. All of this was spread out over 25 players, which also meant that we had more depth than we'd had in a while. After a few days hashing things out in the office after practices we decided to gamble and try something (part formation, part concept) that we had never done before. It did not work out. In fact it crashed and burned pretty gloriously in our first game when we gave up 5 goals to a team that was in no danger of competing for a National Championship. Needless to say the experiment was quickly abandoned.

A return to a more common formation followed  and we spent the next couple games trying rookies and veterans alike in different positions, trying to find a mix that worked. Two solid performances in Kenosha, WI seemed to point to the fact that we were on the right track. And then we travelled to Madison, WI for a midweek tilt and churned out one of the most listless performances in recent Forester history. It was awful. I was disgusted, discouraged, and completely pissed off. In my mind, we were far too skilled, too fast, too experienced, too energetic, too talented, and too deep to play like we absolutely hated soccer but loved standing around a grass field in the all-black outfits TR handed out. Look, they even have numbers on them!

As usual though , a night of tossing and turning lead the coaches to calm down regarding the loss and come up with a small, but ultimately important line-up change. We moved one of our best scorers from the central midfield to sweeper. Suddenly everything seemed to click. It's actually a great coaching lesson-- sometimes the easiest solution to a horrible game is extremely simple. Or as my AP History teacher used to say, "don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

We never looked back. We went the next 10 games without losing. We scored goals, we played defense, we made big saves, we laughed, we had fun, we yelled at each other, and we won and won and won and won. In fact, our third game following the final formation change was one of the best games I have seen from Lake Forest athletes in my eight years with the program. We beat Lawrence at their place by playing some of the most dynamic soccer I've ever seen at this level.

That game seemed to propel us forward into the rest of the season. We had suddenly understood the kind of soccer we were capable of playing, and the intensity and effort we could show in practice,  and over the next few weeks we tried gamely to get there again and again and again. We weren't always totally successful, but our efforts were always enough to get us a victory (and one hard fought tie). That is, of course, until the last weekend of the regular season when we travelled to a teeny little town in downstate Illinois and came face to face with our biggest enemy: ourselves.

TBC.

Trying to gain perspective

The soccer blog has been silent through the end of our season. Obviously. I accept full responsibility. The last week of practice I mentioned that I hadn't updated it for a while and the team was all fired up: "But you have TONS of stuff to post! We won the Conference Tournament!!"
But the thing about it was I really couldn't sift through our success and find anything to write about. Yes we won, but that information was already available as a well-written press release on the Athletic Department page. What did I have to add other than I was really super pumped about going to the NCAA Tournament? (And I was. And am)

T.R. tried to provide some facts to inspire me:
 
--as of last week we were one of the remaining 64 DIII Women's Soccer teams still playing. There are a total of 424 DIII W. Soccer programs, which is the most in any sport, any division. (There are 338 Women's Bball teams for example.)

--The reason California Lutheran University was playing in Iowa with us is that Wartburg College was the westernmost competition site in the Tournament. Most Divison III soccer teams are in the East and Midwest.

Nice facts T.R., and I appreciate the help, but there was no saving my writer's block. As a coach I was excited, nervous, and trying to focus on what we needed to do against Concordia-Moorhead. There was no space in my brain for eloquence.

Anyway, maybe in a couple weeks I will be more prepared to reflect on this season and how our kids managed to get themselves from an embarrassing 0-5 opening loss to having one of the most successful seasons in program history. Because THAT is quite a story.

But until then, check the the Athletics website for updates and nostalgic reflection. Our all-conference selections have been announced. Our awards ceremony is coming up relatively soon. And every soccer players favorite holiday (Thanksgiving--we love to eat) is right around the corner.

All Hallows' Eve

The Halloween practice is a Forester tradition and is almost always both fun and funny. This year we had great participation from the whole team and an interesting array of costumes. One trio dressed as their coaches, another as babies. We had some duos go as Christmas elves and fairies and then individuals as Minnie Mouse, Steamboat Garth, the Periodic Table, Superman, Spongebob, a soccer nerd, a hippie, a girl scout, a devil (complete with tail that made me laugh every time she turned around), a robber/bandit of some sort with a bag of money tied around her waist, a penguin, a "cereal killer," and a Forester ballerina. Our coaches went as a taco and the grim reaper. Our torn-ACL teammate went as an oddly creepy ghost with a limp.

This ghost was creepiest when the sheet was waving in the wind. Shivers.

The best thing to say about this is "no comment"

Santa only wishes these elves were his

By the end of practice I needed Mickey to stop hanging out in that awful diaper

Even when dressed in completely different costumes they manage to wear the same thing

Of course the nerd hangs out with the periodic table of elements

A penguin protects her baby

Napoleon says '"good luck on Friday!"