Senior Girls Soccer

SG Soccer White: Too Much Turkey?

By Erik Van Dyke
You know that feeling when you’ve just finished eating so much Thanksgiving dinner that your stomach actually hurts, and for some reason you still force down a piece of apple pie and a scoop of ice cream, and then you finally push yourself away from the table and all you feel like doing is lying down on your back in the middle of the living room?
 
Now imagine instead of lying down in the living room, you strapped on a pair of cleats and played a soccer game. For 80 minutes. How would that go? Well, that’s what your Spartans looked like this past Wednesday vs Richmond Regional. Sluggish. Listless. Lethargic. Like we’d just polished off our third plate of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy and could barely walk. It wasn’t pretty.
 
I guess a “letdown game” was almost inevitable after the emotionally intense, near-perfect game we played last week vs SC Red. Especially after going a full week without a practice. But it was still disheartening to be that slow to 50/50 balls. To be caught on our heels that much. To communicate so rarely.
 
It wasn’t all bad, of course. Our two captains had solid games, with Camryn Moore winning balls in the midfield and sure-handed Maddie Lippmann recording another shutout. Bernadette von Campenhausen was her juggernaut self, bullying her way through the Raiders defense and notching 2 goals and an assist along the way. And Vivianne Suverza had her best game of the season, earning Player Of The Game honours by coming off the bench and playing so aggressively, so un-hesitatingly and so confidently that once she got on the field there was no way I was taking her off.
 
But as a team we have to be better. We have to FEARLESSLY ATTACK the ball and trust that our teammates have our back. We have to EXPECT THE BALL to come to us, instead of being surprised by it. If we’re going to make mistakes, let’s make aggressive mistakes with zero hesitation.
 
Because if we want to win the ETIAC regular season banner, we’re going to have to go through Alexander Galt AND Massey-Vanier to do it. And to do that, we’ve got to channel the intensity we had a week ago. We know it’s in there somewhere. It’s on US – all of us – to find it again.
 
And there’s no better time to start than this weekend, at our own Stanstead Invitational Tournament! The SIT is a decades-long tradition here at the College, and with two games on Saturday and another two games on Sunday, we have a fantastic opportunity to improve before next week’s all-important league games. Let’s make the most of this!
Coaches VD & K
 
Season Statistics
3 wins 0 losses 1 tie      ETIAC Record:  3-0-1
Goals for: 11   Goals against: 2
 
 
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