Monday, October 15, 2012

Freshening Up

Laurie Bell, a sophomore on the 2012 Milwaukee men's soccer team, will be blogging all season long on the UWM website. Today is his eighth entry of the year.

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We headed into a week-long break in the schedule off the back of an impressive win against Madison last Wednesday. Our solid team performance was enough to beat the strong opposition who had chances to score, but ultimately couldn’t find a way through our defense.

Perhaps after tallying so many shots without many goals to show for them in previous games meant we were due a victory this time around despite being outshot. The clean sheet was also a notable achievement for our freshman goalkeeper Connor Revsbeck on his first start for the Panthers.

Our first weekend without games for a while came as a nice change and provided us welcome opportunity for recovery. Our recent overtime appearances have meant a lot of soccer and some tired legs. So a few days of just light training and some Manther teambuilding exercises have helped to restore our energies and hunger in preparation for our next game against Nebraska-Omaha and then into further conference fixtures.

Off the field we have made a tradition of pre-practice joke telling sessions to start the day off in a positive way. But it is fair to say that as a group we’re more suited to being soccer players than comedians. A couple of comic highlights have come through Richard Johnson’s witticisms, but I think players and coaches alike need to generally step up their humor in order to get more than mild chuckles from the audience or just a defiant clap from the joke teller himself!

We look forward to getting back to competitive action this Tuesday and hope to have plenty of supporting as we aim to continue our perfect record at Engelmann Stadium.