When anyone asks me what sport I play I always reply with a smile on my face because I play the great sport of soccer. Usually, this reply is greeted with disgust and horror because as most would say “You run a lot in soccer!”. In reality, I’ll let you in on a little secret: most of us do not like to run and especially not for punishment reasons. Punishment reasons can range from losing a soccer ball from one of the soccer bags, talking while Coach Wilson or Coach Ryan is talking, not being focused, being slow to come towards a soccer ball, not anticipating where the ball will be played, or not meeting the team’s thirty-five goals in a drill such as wall pass shoot. I can tell you from my past four years of experience that each year the punishment changes or we do one more of one than another.
My freshman year I was introduced to the gasers, a drill that consists of a soccer player starting on one side line, running to the other, and then back to the first sideline twice. That whole process is considered one gaser and it must be done in a certain amount of time before the next one. If the team did not meet the time required to finish one gaser, they would run again.
Another popular drill was the horseshoe my sophomore and junior year. It consisted of us starting anywhere in the main gym, going up to the top of the stairs and back down at a paced I’d like to call “my legs are about to fall off if I run up another stair, are we there yet, we’ll do this only once if I hurry up, how much time is left, oh my only fifteen seconds and I have to go up another flight of stairs. No more yay, and I am about to cough up a lung”.
My senior year, however, the new form of disciplinary running is known as hills. The hill between the first and second fields on the practice field behind the school is what Coach Wilson calls our “new best friend”. My teammates and I meet this new best friend with the great sound of a whistle. Up and back down the Hill we go!
By the end of all the running and drills the players come out as comrades, teammates, a hard working group of girls and one step closer to both our team and individual goals. The road always starts out rocky because of the transition the program takes each year due to the incoming freshmen and the departing seniors. But each year we come to a point where we have learned how to connect passes by finally anticipating where our teammate is going to be, learning about each other’s weaknesses and finding out what strategies work best for us to beat another team. I have had a great time playing with these crazy groups of girls for the past four years. The best part is seeing each one of us at the soccer banquet, out of our sweaty socks, cleats and messy hair, dressed in formal attire. If only you could see the smiles and the growth we have experienced as people, teammates and players. Go LHS Girls’ Soccer!