Peter Sanger, a senior on the 2010 Milwaukee men's soccer team, will be blogging all season long on the UWM website. Today is his fourth blog entry.
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From the beaches on the East Coast, we headed back to classrooms on the East Side. A week off of games gave us plenty of time to recover and prepare for the upcoming week of action. In the classroom, it was a bit of a wake-up call as professors doled out the first homework assignments. Personally, I’m still struggling to remember my schedule and find my self constantly pulling out my laptop to check where I need to be and when.
It was a good week of practice though. We got a chance to talk over what went right and wrong during the weekend and trained accordingly. This week called for a heavy dose of crossing and finishing drills and some conditioning. For me, there’s nothing better. As a winger, it’s what I do every game, so the opportunity to fine-tune my game is always a plus.
On Friday night, a lot of us players got to head to Pantherfest for the first time. Since I’ve been at UWM, we always missed it due to having games, so it was a pretty cool experience. The Marcus Amphitheater was packed and the performances were pretty cool. I’m not a huge fan of the type of music that went down in the first act, but seeing Kid Cudi perform was sweet. I saw him at the Rave last winter and he did a lot of music off his new album, so that was a good change of pace.
The one good part about school starting is that it’s soccer season in Europe as well. So on Saturday’s, I spend about as much time as the typical American spends watching college football watching soccer games played in England’s Premier League and Italy’s Serie A. Thankfully Fox Soccer Channel was broadcasting Arsenal’s game this week, so I got a chance to watch my favorite club simply outclass Bolton Wanderers in a 4-1 thrashing. They’re only two points off of the leaders Chelsea, so this season looks promising. Something that made me even happier was to watch the other so called title contenders: Man United, Tottenham and Man City, all tie. Every season everybody says that Arsenal will be the team knocked out of the "Big 4" because they don’t spend a lot of money, but it just goes to show you that money doesn’t always buy success.
Going into this next week of games, I’m feeling pretty good about our chances. Tuesday will give us a good chance to test ourselves on the road again against IPFW and the Madison Tournament is always a good acid test for where your team stands going into conference play. Hopefully we’ll come away with three wins this week and be going into Horizon League play on a high. Furthermore, they got a new layer down on the turf field this past week at Engelmann, so hopefully come September 26 we’ll have a brand new field to play on in front of all our fans against defending regular-season champs Butler.
To finish this entry off, I’ve decided to start throwing in some thank you’s to the people who’ve helped me get to where I am today, whether they read this or not. Tonight I just want to give a shout-out to a lot of former Panthers who helped me make it through some of the tougher times. So a big-ups goes to Kenny Ogorzalek, Elliott Dunn, Calvin Mai, Van Hong, Evan Bartzis and Sam Alexander. With the amount of time you spend with your team, it’s not hard to believe that some of your teammates become your better friends, so here’s to those of mine who’ve since graduated or moved on to other schools. Until next week,
Joga Bonito
