Orange Beach Preseason Diary by Katie Holtzapfel: Day Five
8/18/2003 12:00:00 AM | Soccer
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As of about one hour ago, we officially ended another great preseason here in Orange Beach. In the past four journals, I hope I’ve emphasized enough how incredibly helpful and cooperative the people have been here in Orange Beach, but I should also mention our very own staff. Every last person involved with this soccer team works so extremely hard for us, day in and day out, in season and out of season.
For obvious reasons, Coach Staley never stops working, both on the field and behind his desk. Since my first day here, I’ve known Coach to be a great businessman and recruiter, but this preseason we’ve seen a much more active coaching approach from him, and he’s been very visible (and, of course, audible) in just about every minute of every practice.
Jesper Sjokvist works every day to improve our fitness, and he far exceeds his obligations as just our strength and conditioning coach. He worked all summer, every last day of all three months, with those players who stayed in Tuscaloosa for summer school (I’m still catching grief from him for moving home for the third summer in a row).
Mitchell Nelson is another who most definitely deserves mentioning. Mitchell, or simply “The Voice,” works constantly behind the scenes, and although he works as Coach’s assistant, his responsibilities also far exceed his title. As “The Voice,” Mitchell announces all of our home games, and when November rolls around, Mitchell will be announcing for all of the tournament games as “The Voice of the SEC Tournament.” Michelle Worman is another who works behind the scenes, although she doesn’t necessarily work as a staff member. Coach refers to Michelle simply as a friend of the program, and she fills that role perfectly. Michelle accommodates to all of our needs, whether she bakes us cookies for a road trip or decorates our locker room on game day. This upcoming year we also have the luxury of adding Missy Keller, a former player here at Alabama and an all-conference performer, to the coaching staff as a volunteer assistant. Since Missy has played with a majority of the players on our team, she often easily sees the game from our perspective and helps solve many of the game-related problems we have, especially defensively.
Rena Richardson, one of our two assistant coaches, really deserves more credit than I, or any other person for that matter, can give her. Rena works every day to motivate and inspire us and never stops demanding the very best from every last person on this team. She never loses faith in this team, and since we see firsthand the time and effort she sacrifices for us, she makes the people on this team want to play hard for her. Teresa Patterson, another assistant coach, just joined our program about three weeks ago, and she works mostly with our two goalkeepers. Teresa demands a high work rate out of everyone on the team and brings yet another fresh perspective to the field.
Speaking of the goalkeepers, Laura Lowman and Carly Carson definitely deserve credit for surviving such a demanding preseason. Laura, a sophomore from Huntsville, and Carly, a true freshman from Canada, have trained every day individually with Teresa and have worked so extremely hard in every session. Carly and I talked earlier THIS afternoon during lunch, and she admitted that this preseason has been more intense than she originally expected, but she has handled it very well, making all of her fitness and playing well in our scrimmages. Carly isn’t the only goalkeeper to make her fitness, though, because Laura could very well be one of the fittest players on the team. Since Laura’s first day here with this team, she has only kept improving. Every time she steps into her box, she becomes more confident and earns even more respect from her players and coaches.
It’s truly hard to believe we finished our last preseason practice in Orange Beach today. We’ve accomplished so much here in the past five days, and we’ve actually enjoyed our preseason. I can’t pretend as if we suffered through the five days because honestly the coaching staff never tried to mentally or physically break any of us. As a team, we approached this preseason differently than ever before. We agreed we would take advantage of every practice and use it as a chance to build. As much as we dreaded fitness, we used each fitness session with Jesper as a chance to improve ourselves. I’m so proud of the players on this team and how they responded. We’ve continued to build on the progress we made this past spring, and this upcoming fall looks very promising.
We finished the evening once again with an amazing dinner, thanks to Blalock Seafood. Tonight they served shrimp, crab legs, corn, potatoes, chicken, salad, and bread. Afterwards, we took lots of pictures and, sadly enough, said good-bye to the incredible people here and all of their families. But, we all agreed that this wasn’t a permanent good-bye because we’d all be back to visit later this fall, and we’d be celebrating much more than just the end of preseason.
Roll Tide!
Katie
