We Found Love

What a year it has been. For us all. After coming into the conference tournament as a SEVEN seed (out of eight), we brought every ounce of passion, desire, and love for the game we had together and won it all.  It was so much harder to leave school after this semester and I’ve been trying to figure out why.  Is it only because we won a championship and I didn’t want to leave that in the past?  That is a reason, yes, but there is something else that was there this year that has been stronger than ever.

I have always felt a sense of family ever since I stepped onto Auburn’s campus.  But there was something we had this year that I’ve never experienced before! Auburn is all about family, most know that from our football program.  It’s not only within athletics and your individual team, but throughout the entire campus.  After we won in Orange Beach, there were so many people that recognized us, called us out across the concourse, and congratulated us and told us what an incredible thing it was that we had just accomplished. I was Christmas shopping in Auburn the other day, nearly 6 weeks later, and people still congratulated me in the store.

Here are a few pictures that give a small picture of our experience this year in Orange Beach!

Auburn Soccer, though, was something else this year.  We all really saw and felt the end as we rode the bus back to Auburn after we lost our final game.  No one wanted to leave.  We had all been “all in” since the first day of preseason, and we were on such a natural high that no one was ready to say goodbye.  I feel so blessed to be apart of this program, from players to coaches to staff to parents. The support from our parents this year was unbelievable – having a tigerwalk at every game regardless of the location was an added motivation to every match!  Our individual families gave us a prime example of how to be a family on and off the field this year.  Never could I imagine being anywhere else, so, war eagle to that.  It is unreal the amount of support our program had this season, and truly amazing the friendships that were strengthened and formed.  It’s hard to explain in words how much this program means to us all, but it shows when you can’t say goodbye to your teammates without tears!

And yes we adopted the elephant out of our condo, named him, and made him part of the team........ don't judge us please. I guess you could say that down in Orange Beach, we found love in a hopeless place!

WE MISS BABAR!!!!!

Attitude is Everything

Wow. What a journey this semester has been so far.  Everything has been happening so fast.  The regular season is over, and we are on to the SEC Tournament next week. 

This has been quite a season of highs and lows.   There has been so much emotion packed into the last 5 months. The day I returned to the soccer field will forever be an amazing memory in my life.  Losing to a few teams we shouldn’t have, falling a little short of what we wanted to accomplish so far – a low.  And today I’m really having a hard time putting things into perspective, but I’m slowly regaining it back.  What is really important?  We play sports because we love the competition and we love our teammates and coaches and we really just love to play.  But what happens when we aren’t good enough? What happens when we do fall short?

We’ve all heard the phrase winning isn’t everything, but in college and professional sports, it seems like it is.  So much that after a bad loss or disappointing season, we feel lost and out of our real selves.  If we want to be ourselves – our happy, fun loving, young college selves – it’s hard to do when everything is focused on winning. 

But when it all comes down to it, attitude is everything.  We may lose to teams we shouldn’t have, we may fall short of our goals, but there is nothing we can do about it.  All we can do is look forward and play every game as if were the last game of the season, because it very well could be. 

Auburn soccer has something big to prove next week.  We have worked hard since the day our previous season ended, all for this moment -- postseason.  We want to play as long as we can, we want our seniors to have as many games as they can.   God has a plan for all of us, and we know that great things take time, so maybe this is the time for us next week, to prove once again that we can compete with anyone.

End of Nicaragua - Beginning of a New Season

So I really enjoyed writing my first blog post, so here goes a second try!  I’ll give a little bit more of Nicaragua. By the end of our 10 days in Granada, the five of us felt like we had been there for multiple months.  Not at all in a bad way, however.  We knew our way around, knew the girls (the cutest little girl named Ana-go figure!-attached to Maddie), and knew the coaches and staff as well.  It was pretty cool interacting with the other girls and Nicaraguan and American coaches in a way that didn’t make us seem like the new kids anymore. 

Larissa had asked Katy and I if we she could take us around the town one night.  We were SO excited, but unfortunately were running late that day, so after our last school visit of the day, Katy and I literally SPRINTED back to our house in the barrio (the neighborhood).  It was a good mile, mile and a half.  It was actually hilarious because I was wearing a backpack so I’m sure all of the Nica people outside of their houses thought the two of us were crazy gringos.  But we made it back! Sweating more than I did the whole trip, Claudia had cookies and freshly squeezed fresco for us when we got back.  Larissa was so excited, and so were we.  She brought us around town that night, showed us the churches, her school, giving us our own personal tour.  It was a more than fantastic night, one of the best nights of the whole trip.  At one point, Larissa just turned to Katy and me and said, “I am so happy!”.  That was definitely a high of the trip. 

We headed to Managua to play the Nicaraguan National Team.  It was an awesome ride there, with the Mariposas and Estrellas singing the entire way.  I actually was quite miserable the whole ride because I had to go the bathroom SO SO SO bad.  But I was enjoying listening to the girls all the same.  For some of them it was there first time leaving Granada – that was an awesome thing to be a part of.  The stadium was GIANT. And I mean absolutely giant – the one sided bleachers seemed to reach as high as Jordan-Hare!  We were all anxious to see how we would play together, since we had never practiced and had only met each other the week before.  Started out as a great game, with Lydia getting the first goal! They got a PK on us, but Lydia put a second in making it 2-1 at half. 

I could go a number of ways explaining the second half.  About 15 minutes in, the ball was rolling quickly over the end line.  Sprinting to save it from going out of bounds, I took a wrong step and the worst happened.  I felt things happen in my knee that I didn’t know was possible.  I was taken off the field, and Mary, the head of Soccer Without Borders, had to jump in goal (and wear a HIDEOUS pink keeper jersey, I felt really bad for her).  She did awesome though! And we landed another goal, ending the game 3-1.  As I lay on the sideline after the game, not sure what had just happened, I experienced one of the greatest moments of the trip.  The Mariposas (youngest team of girls that we worked with that week) ran over to me, hugging me and asking if I was okay.  They all seemed so concerned and sad for me.  Their compassion and care blew me away. What touched me even more are the get well cards send by the whole program about 3 weeks later.  Volunteers long gone, and they still cared. Those seven and eight year old girls brought tears to my eyes, adding to my love for Nicaragua and its people. 

I stayed overnight in Managua with Ana and Maddie, who fortunately (and unfortunately) knew exactly how to handle the situation.  We flew back the next morning, and I saw Dr. Andrews the next day.  The worst was confirmed, I had torn my ACL and some partial tearing in my meniscus and MCL.  I had surgery about a week later, and here we are today, 2 months post-op, and I am so excited to get back on the field. 

The crazy thing is, I don’t associate my injury to the trip at all.  I had such an amazing experience those ten days in Nicaragua with my friends and with the program, that something so horrible couldn’t even make a dent in the trip.  I can’t wait to return to Nicaragua and see all the people and coaches and places we became so accustomed to that week. 

As for now, this injury just gives me a different kind of challenge than I was expecting this fall. It's a tough recovery, much tougher than I thought.  But I'm trying to be myself and encourage my teammates as they embark on what could be a history making season. As they put in hard work towards our team goals, they all motivate me to rehab and gain strength towards my individual goals.  If I wasn't working for my team, there wouldn't be much to work for.  I’ve gotten better and stronger every single day, and I am so lucky to have the most incredible support of my teammates and Auburn Soccer staff that I could ever ask for.  If I wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t get very far at all!

And here we are, four days into preseason, we've worked hard all summer, I should be running in a few weeks, and everyone’s looking great! We’re ready for a great season, and if we keep working hard and improving every day like we have so far, this could be one for the books!

SWB in Nicaragua!

Hi! I'm Amy, known to my Auburn family as Howie. I have some free time on my hands so I figured I would blog.  I know that no more than about ten people will ever read my blog, but might as well say it anyways, enjoy! 

On May 13, four of my teammates and I set out on a journey of a lifetime to Granada, Nicaragua.  We traveled with an organization called Futbol sin Fronteras (Soccer Without Borders).  This program is a mission-trip like setup, recruiting college players and soccer lovers from around the U.S. to give up some of their time to coach a girls camp in Granada.  We arrived a day early to sightsee and enjoy some of the culture.  Ana is Nicaraguan, and much of her family lives there, so it was awesome to get some of the insight and culture from her.  The first night we stayed on Lake Apoyo, in a quaint little hostel called the Monkey Hut.  The people there were great.  The place was great and we loved everything about it.  We lived our first night without air conditioning, which was definately a wake-up call (at least for me). We spent the first afternoon and morning in Nicaragua living the life--kayaking and swimming in the lake, searching for mango trees with a beautiful mountain landscape as our background, reading in handmade hammocks, hiking and exploring along the dirt roads around the lake, and ate a fresh as can be dinner, full of delicious chicken, rice, beans, vegetables, and FRESCA!

We arrived in Granada the next day, and I have to say my first thought as we were carrying our bags almost a mile to our homestay home, in the blazing heat, sweating, was what have I gotten myself into? But now, I'm sure that thought was because I was so unfamiliar with my surroundings.  As the week went on and I knew my way around, got to know some of the people, and became more comfortable with the city, I felt like I had lived there for months, and I loved it.  So many things we did in Granada were worth mentioning, but I'm not trying to bore anyone here. So I'll highlight a few.

My favorite thing that we did were school visits.  I had no idea we would be visiting any schools, but being an elementary education major, that is right up my alley.  We did school visits as a type of recruiting tool to get more girls in the program, but also to instill pride in the girls already involved.  That was the whole basis of the week--pride.  We taught Physical Education classes at the schools we went to, incorporating relay races, head catch (cabeza manos!), and link tag into the day.  At the end the girls already in the program would talk to there classmates about the teams they were on and the program.  It was cool to see the girls get excited or very shy about talking, but you could tell how proud they were of their teams regardless of thier public speaking skills.

 

The kids really loved pictures, these are some beautiful boys at one of our school visits

The children at the schools were such a joy to be around.  They all had genuine happiness and loved their school and classmates.  The schools were very different than what we are used to here.  Stone buildings with open classrooms, no air conditioning, very minimal extras.  The great thing about it is, they don't need the extras.  They are learning and loving and living everyday--without shopping malls, without video games, without fast food restaraunts.  Being in Nicaragua was great because the people were so genuine and had such pure happiness with so little compared to the average American.

Another highlight of the trip was our homestay.  Katy and I were privelaged to stay with an amazing family. Our house mom's name was Claudia, and one of the nicest people I have ever met.  The kids were so friendly and happy to help with whatever we needed, especially with teaching me Spanish (Katy was very good, I knew about 10 words total).  The youngest daughter, Larissa, really took to Katy and I.  She took the time to teach me Spanish almost every night we were there, and loved every second of it.  She was the sweetest little girl.  She made Katy and I a gift in art class, so we decided to return the favor.  She LOVED Hannah Montana, so we found a Hannah Montana themed game of Monolopy at the Masaya market, and she was so ecstatic. That was one of the best parts of the whole trip.  She probably said thank you and hugged us at least ten times that night!

Okay so I'm itching to publish something, so I'll stop here for my first blog.  There is so much more to say about my experience to Nicaragua, so keep checking back!