Today is his third entry of the campaign as he chronicles the adventures of the team during his senior season.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Two weeks into school and it’s safe to say everything is into full swing of things: classes, soccer and our social lives. We are all finding our weekly schedules falling into routines. It has also become a weekly thing for us to ask Strength and Conditioning coach Matt Holt for a full game recap from his Wednesday night coed C League indoor soccer games. He is rather giddy every Wednesday afternoon for our team warm ups knowing he is getting back onto the field himself. His game tactics strictly include kicking hard and running fast. He has picked up a few cards for plowing opponents over, and we still await our first career goal.
This past weekend our squad hopped on an airplane and headed out to Spokane, Washington, to take on Houston Baptist and Gonzaga in the Gonzaga Classic. It was a bit of a rough departure as Thursday morning’s report date to the locker room to set off to the airport was 4:30 A.M. You can bet there wasn’t much atmosphere in the locker room that morning. Whenever you travel as a team through the airport, you turn a lot of heads and get a lot of questions. The classic, “So what team are you guys”, while every single team member has a Milwaukee Soccer team polo on.
After we landed and got all settled into our hotel, we took a walk through Gonzaga’s campus to find an area where we could do a bit of jogging and stretching to loosen up our traveled legs and break a sweat, and coach even hopped in himself. The campus was beautiful, as well as their newly built soccer stadium. The facilities and hospitality were great. We took on Houston Baptist early the next morning where we dropped a 2-1 loss. Once again, felt we were the better team of the match. Matthias Binder scored a great goal to tie the game up, but we conceded a goal later on, in which we thought we could of defended better. Our second game of the trip, we took on tournament hosts Gonzaga. We knew coming into the game that they were a tough team to play against, with a group of hard working guys. We certainly rose to the occasion and matched their work rate. We felt good about our efforts and fight throughout the game, but once again disappointed with a 1-0 loss. With the team’s record not looking the best on paper, we are fully confident in our system and our abilities. We have a very talented group this year and play very attractive soccer. We are extremely close to putting together a full game, sharp in both the offensive and defensive thirds.
Good friend of mine and fellow captain, Declan Rodriguez, was lucky to have his family make the trip down from Vancouver to support him. On our recovery day, Zach Stevenson and myself got the chance to spend some time together with them as well. We journeyed to a nearby shopping mall. As I didn’t find anything that caught my eye, the shop included a purchase of some rascal camouflage pants from Dex. We were fortunate to sit down and have a nice lunch with Declan’s family. As always, I was picked on for my plain diet habits and getting a regular cheeseburger. The final night spent in Spokane, things heated up when a very close teammate of mine received a very sincere text message from his special lady friend that left a few of us wondering about his market availability. We may have lost another good man to the relationship bug, but as good teammates we are, we will support him through it.
In all, the weekend was another good experience where our staff was able to put us in a very professional setting in terms of getting to travel and playing in a fantastic collegiate environment. With a few upsetting previous results, all our focusd has now switched to this weekend where we will travel to Michigan to take on last year’s Horizon League champions, Oakland. It will be a good Oakland team to play against in our conference opener, but our guys are certainly ready for it.
-Dust
