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'Rolling with Boling' Blog - Aug. 20, 2009
August 20, 2009 | Women's Soccer
Aug. 20, 2009
Previous 'Rolling with Boling' Blog Entries - June 15, 2009 | July 14, 2009
As usual, things have been pretty hectic around the Ville since I last wrote, but even more so now that we are in preseason training. :-) The beginning of the season has been unusual for a few reasons this year with the first being that we were supposed to start on Aug. 4, but were detained by a teeeeny bit of rain...
On Monday morning, I expected to sleep in until around noon before heading over to our meetings at 3 p.m., but instead was awoken at 8:30 (much to my dismay) by the sound of what I thought was my house falling on top of me. After crouching in the fetal position and screaming for a minute, I peered out the window to find that oh, it was just 1,000 tons of golf ball-sized hail falling out of the sky. Along with that (we found out later on) came six inches of rain in 75 minutes, and the city was flooded. Coach called as she was kayaking from her car to her office to tell us that the first day of preseason would have to be postponed until Tuesday, and my roommates and I focused on pumping all of the standing water out of our basement. We had to repeat this maneuver every 30 minutes for the next 12 hours, which was a joy as you can imagine. However, we were lucky, as many had at least two feet of water in their basements and destroyed cars (including Kaitie McDonald!) and offices. Some of our classrooms at the university were damaged as well, and will not be open for fall classes.
Before the flood and while I've been at UofL, we've had a tornado, earthquake, ice storm and hurricane. We told all of this to our new assistant coach Natalie Cocchi a few weeks ago, and her response was, "What's next, a flood?" Well, thanks a lot Cocchi, and you don't get to make any more weather predictions!
Despite of all the water we got on with preseason, finishing our fitness testing on the first two days. Then we finally got to get a practice in on the third day before playing the Irish National Team. It was such a privilege to be able to play a national team, and something that many collegiate players do not have the opportunity to do in their four years at school. But with that privilege also came the fact that we had one practice under our belt, and the freshman had not yet played in a collegiate game, let alone a game against a national team. We ended up losing 3-0 in regulation time, but learned a lot about ourselves as a team and had a great experience.
After the Irish game, we started two-a-days before traveling to Dayton for another exhibition. We played three 30-minute halves against them, losing 1-0 in the end. In practice this week, we've really been focusing on doing the things we need to do in order to become better individually and as a unit. The two exhibitions we've played have shown glimpses of how good a team we can really be, but they also exposed some issues we have to work through. We've been working hard for the past two weeks on perfecting them so we will be ready to play Miami (Ohio) in our season-opener on Friday at 7 p.m. ET at Cardinal Park (that was a plug, so come!!).
Well, that was a long one, so I'll have to write later on next week about the ropes course we went to today and other miscellaneous preseason happenings. I cannot wait to kick the season off on Friday because I am so excited about this team. We'll be there. Will you!?
See ya at the game,
Lindsay
