Men's Soccer

twoinanddone
Thu, 08 Oct 2015 05:20:10 +0000

My daughter had, at least in part, the opposite experience. Her coach had them do too much bonding and DD just wanted to get on with college! She lived in a suite with 3 other freshmen players, with another 5 living nearby. At times it was just too much togetherness. She had made other friends and wanted to spend a Saturday with them at the beach or just go out on a Friday night with others, not the same 15 kids she worked out with at 6 am and had a meeting with at 6 pm and sat at study tables with from 7 to 9 pm. I guess the coaches are damned if they do, damned if they don’t host bonding events.

Most kids who play in college were the top on their high school or club team, and it is hard to share that spotlight. My daughter made a different choice in that she chose a new team which meant she’d probably get to play more (in fact she got to play 100% of the time) but she knew they were going to lose a lot. One other problem that we didn’t anticipate was that with few experienced players, there wasn’t a lot of leadership on the team. Several of the upperclassmen were transfers, so no one could really organize big bonding events as they were just learning the ins and outs of the school too. The coach was new to the school, the asst coach too, so everyone was just doing what they thought was best.

She did have some conflicts with the head coach and felt the asst. coach was easier to approach. There were times when I didn’t think she’d go back this year, but she did and it is a lot better because she’s living with other athletes who aren’t on her team, she has a boyfriend and escapes to his apartment, she’s figure out how to balance her team time and school time and other social time better. She also realized that a lot of her friends who went to big D1 programs hadn’t had much playing time as freshmen and she looked back on her experience and decided she’d had a pretty good year. It is not fun to not play, especially if he was used to playing in most games. My DD has 5-8 on her team who rarely get to play a minute - I don’t know how they stay motivated. In fact one freshman decided not to be on the team this year, and another who did get playing time but complained about the amount was dismissed for behavior issues this year. Being a student athlete isn’t easy.