Tough Year

I can’t believe how much time has come and gone since the last entry, which was when the Irish team was in Iceland. Since then I was lucky enough to heal myself up over Christmas, sign on with a fantastic new team in Norway called Kolbotn, and go to France with Ireland and start and play almost the full match against one of the top 10 teams in the world in February. I was in Spain for training camp with Kolbotn in March and then it was back to Vancouver for the Western Canada Soccer Showcase in April. It went incredibly smoothly, despite having doubled in size and having teams involved from as far away as Manitoba! Back to Norway it was in April after the Showcase was finished, and that is when my injury nightmare began. It started with pulling my calf in a game with our second team which I was playing in to get back in the groove from missing a few of our Toppserien matches when I was in Vancouver. Since then the injury has plagued me, first for almost 2 months in Norway, which I managed to heal up in time to get fit for our training camp with Ireland in the US this summer. I lasted about 3 weeks of intense training in the US before the injury flared up again and now after a couple of weeks of rest I am trying to get myself into tip top shape again for the last 5 matches of our Toppserien season and for the possibility of getting called into camp with Ireland for 2 important Qualifier Matches in September. I have to say that this year of being injured and feeling like my body won’t allow me to give 110 percent and the constant worry of something flaring up has really had me questioning if I want to keep going.  I am grateful to be “living the dream” as so many of my office bound friends tell me, but there is a large deal of sacrifice that is involved, mostly financially (and I’m not talking having to drive a beater versus a beamer…more along the lines of how am I going to pay for physio and for dinner?), which is so completely worth it when I am on that field competing and learning. But having to spend so much time on the sidelines and the mental anguish as much as the physical has just started to wear on me a little, and for the first time I see stopping as a real and true possibility. I tell myself though that I have overcome so much including injuries that felt just as neverending and devastating as this last one with my calf/achilles so to just stick with it. I head back to Norway at the end of August, so I guess I’ll just have to see how this Fall goes…

1-1.

We managed to tie Iceland today. It was so exciting. We got scored on in the first 2 minutes of the match but managed to pull it together and get the tie to head back to Iceland with. I’m so proud of our team. I really believe if we put together the effort with the fight I have seen since I have been with this team that we can do it.

Its been hard for me not to be a part of it and to be watching because of the stupid injury I had last weekend. On one hand I am really grateful that in such an awkward tackle I managed to escape relatively unscathed, but on the flip side of it, I am pretty sure that if this had happened a week or two prior to when it did, I would have been fine for the match today and Thursday. So bummed out.

I guess these things happen, I’m trying to be positive, but being in the thick of it and watching everyone out there fighting so hard for something, it was just hard to be only able to watch.

Anyways, I guess again its just one of those tests where you have to just accept that life hands you lemons sometimes and just focus on yourself and working as hard as you can to be as good as you can, with the idea that sooner or later you will be rewarded for putting that work in.

That being said, fingers crossed we get it done in Iceland and qualify!

 

In Dublin. Disappointed but Thankful.

So I got into Dublin yesterday, not without my prerequisite airport drama. Honestly, I don’t seem to have the brain power not to have some kind of craziness I offered to take my roommate on the Irish team, MT’s bags because she was travelling in Europe since our last camp. I was trying to coordinate with a couple of buddies to pick up the bag….and then I ended being on a train that for the first time I have ever taken the airport train, didn’t stop. Awesome So after buying a ticket back to her stop, missing the train by seconds, I asked her to just drive to the airport so I didnt take any risks. If you wonder why I am so paranoid, I forgot my passport the last trip we had, missed my flight and had to pay $400 to buy a new flight so I could meet the team before we drove to Sweden. Ridiculous!

So I am in Dublin now, and of course being in the thick of things now I am SO bummed that I am not going to be able to play. It sucks, just terrible luck. But at the same time, I was thinking last night about that cheezy yet true quote. Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react. So I am trying my best to see the positive, most of all that I am only out for a few weeks and then I’m back ready for next season and just use this disappointment as the fuel to fire my best year yet. 2009. I was talking to my teammate Denise last night who has been on the Irish team for a long time, and she was saying how amazing it is for them to be 2 games away from playing in a major championship because they used to get hammered so often. So I am just going to cross every finger I have that we make it, and work so hard to be a leader on the team in terms of preparation and hope to have an impact in 2009.

And as a p.s. I just am drinking my first caramel machiato. I think its the best thing I have ever tasted in my life. GO IRELAND!

Cautious Optimism

So, I travelled 2 hours south yesterday to go to my team’s town and take a visit with the dentist and the physio. I managed to miss the train cause the subway was late, so I was on a bus, trying to communicate with the driver to let me off early so our manager could pick me up. No luck On the way home things were just as exciting as the train broke down mid journey in the middle of nowhere and the lights went out. Good thing I understand some Norwegian otherwise I think I would have been kind of petrified that I was in the middle of a hostage taking or something.

Since I am an expert at all matters of the MCL, the physio didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know. Pretty swollen from the fall, hard to tell how bad it is etc. It is always funny to me trying to go to doctor’s physios etc who are not speaking your language as their first one, and the way that you can’t just pretend like you understand like perhaps you would in regular conversation…cause a head nod and “oh really”, that might work if you are talking about the weather tomorrow, doesn’t work if they are telling you in the foreign language that your knee is screwed beyond belief. So we had a pretty cute mix of Norwegian/English going on, that made me feel cautiously optimistic about my knee. At the end of the day, with some perspective, I am realizing that I am really lucky its not very bad, because it really could have been, and worst case scenario I am not ready for the weekend and next week for our playoff games, and just cheer really hard that we make the Euro’s and beat Iceland with Ireland, and have an opportunity to work my butt off before the tournament next summer to make sure I am on the field contributing then. My tooth is a bit loose, and I’m having some trouble eating, but it will hopefully tighten up soon. Dentist said 14 days. And who said soccer isn’t a dangerous sport

I did write to my Ireland coach and let him know that I was injured. That is always a tough one. I have learned that sometimes it is better not to let on at all that one is injured. In such tough selections for teams etc, I’ve realized sometimes its just better to tough out the pain and be anonymous. But I think at the end of the day I have realized, that you just focus on what you can control and developing yourself into a player that the coach wants more than anything to put on the field. And right now, with being a new player on the team, and not feeling 100 percent right now, I felt like I needed to let him know there was a chance I wouldn’t be 100 percent. Anyways, we’ll see. My knees are starting to feel better, hence my mood is improving

On the girlsCAN front, I have spent the morning organizing the Western Canada Showcase for next year. I am so excited for another great tournament. Despite so many obstacles, pulling the tournament off last year was one of my biggest accomplishments. Seeing how many girls got opportunities from it, got letters, and through it realized that they have potential as players to go somewhere, was one of the most fulfilling things for me. I have some papers to write for school here in Oslo, but so much more fun organizing the tournament Life is full and busy.

Anyways, need to head to the gym to get this knee going…..krydser fingerene (cross your fingers

Injury…

Well I know its a part of playing at this level, but no one said its easy to deal with.

I played my old team yesterday, Asker. We lost, which sucked, but unfortunately for me at about the 60th minute, I went up for a header with one of my old teammates Toril, and I managed to hit her head with my mouth/teeth and the worst part for me, land really awkwardly falling inward on my knees. I’m not quite sure what happened, I just remember seeing the ball, going for it, and then landing in a lot of pain on the ground. My mouth was bleeding so I guess it was what grabbed the attention but as I tried to stand up, both my knees were in a lot of pain and I could hardly put pressure on them to stand up. Toril got taken to the hospital to get stitches. I tried to come back in and played about 5-10 minutes in a fog before asking to get taken out.

The worst part for me is that I am supposed to go to Ireland on Thursday for 2 HUGE matches against Iceland, one in Ireland, the other in Iceland. Right now, my knees feel like I pulled both of my MCL’s and I just feel like crap. A couple of my teeth feel loose as well and I look like I have been punched in the face. I just feel so sad about the timing, yet trying to stay hopeful that another few days of rest and I’ll be good to go. I just can’t tell right now, my knees hurt so much, but I dont know if its part of how hard I fell on them or if the pain is from something structural on the inside.

I am stressed too about being injured in another country and how much this is going to cost if I have done something. These are things that I just hate about the struggle of trying to play. In those rare moments of feeling sorry for oneself, I just think about men’s players and how damn easy they have it and how unfair it is to be worrying not only about if I am going to be able to play for my national team this weekend but how I am going to pay for my treatment to do what I know I need to to get better as soon as I can.

I’m feeling really down and just crossing my fingers that this isn’t serious…

The Struggle

So a little update on practice that I spoke about in the last blog about being super nervous at. I had a little pep talk with myself at the train station on the way to practice (dont worry I managed to do it in a smooth enough way that it happened inside my head and I wasn’t some weirdo just chatting away to myself), because again, I was starting to feel nervous. And I told myself that I was proud of myself for having the courage to go so far out of my comfort zone. That there weren’t very many people that would put themselves in the position that I was putting myself into, so just to go out there and do the best that I could, and who cared if I made the odd mistake. I got to practice, and even now just knowing a few more people, I felt more comfortable and just relaxed and enjoyed myself and felt like I did the best I could, which at the end of the day should be all that any of us are focused on.

I ended up taking the train back into Oslo with a couple of English girls on the team who have also played in a few different places, and we just started talking about what life as a female player is like and just the struggle that seems to happen in every country, just to have the opportunity to play.

Not only finding a way to make enough money to survive first and foremost to be able to just play at an elite level, but then also having to deal with the lack of professionalism that often permeates women’s soccer from all sides. We exchanged stories of injuries and the struggle and drain of finances, just to take care of an injury properly, even when playing with “professional” clubs. We also touched on, as I have witnessed so clearly as a player myself, the power imbalance that exists where often players have to put up with things that they wouldn’t in the “real world” because they have worked so hard to get to an elite level. Coaches hold all the power because they know that they make the decision whether or not to choose a player, and if someone stands up for something they can just be dropped. Its not like a men’s player, who can just sulk off and make their 6 or 7 figure salary, as female players, we play purely for the passion and for the love of the game, because that’s all we are getting out of it from a tangible perspective and therefore, with such few options, we lose any power in most situations as most of us are just desperate to play.

I’m determined to change the landscape of women’s soccer, although in some ways you would hope that the passion, sacrifice and love of the game, that so many of us play with, would be held over, even if things did get better for women playing the beautiful game.

But I am happy to be in Oslo getting the opportunity to improve myself as a person and as a player, even if its hard and a little lonely sometimes.

Overcoming Our Biggest Obstacle, Ourselves

“What the mind can conceive, the heart can believe, the body will achieve”

Its one of my favourite quotes, one a friend gave to me a long time ago and it highlights the importance of the mind in reaching any goal or dream.

For me, I have struggled with this side of my game for a very long time. I’m not sure quite why. On one hand, I think my ability to persevere through hardship is my best mental asset and definitely whats gotten me as far as I am now. I peg that trait to my Mum, who has spent a good part of the last 10 years in a wheelchair because of MS, but who continues to be the first person to count her blessings and have a smile on her face. When you have that as your example, its pretty hard not to just be determined to get through the hard things in life and just decide that you will. That being said, I have had anxiety issues with soccer for a really long time. As an athlete you hit a point where you know what you need to do, where you need to be, technically how to pull things off, but it truly is the mind where our greatest power lies, because anything is truly possible if we can find a way to control the biggest weapon that we’ve been given for success.

For me, there are two things that I have worked so hard to overcome. The first is what I perceive other people to be saying negatively about me, and the second thing is the negative things I say to myself. I’ve said that to friends…how sometimes when I step out of my own head and listen to what I am saying to myself I am horrified, because its so different to how I would ever talk to anyone in real life. In terms of thinking other people are thinking things about me….I feel like it takes me back to when I was 14 with some major social anxiety, and I was petrified of going in our school’s cafeteria because I thought everyone would think what a geek I was that I had no friends. And then I realized that everyone was as self conscious as me and I’d just control what I could, which was just being as good a friend as I possibly could.

So these issues have been coming up a little for me lately again, this anxiety and worrying about things outside of just enjoying the game for what it is and walking off the field having given my best effort. In particular I have been practicing with a team with some unreal players during the week, as the team I am currently on is a 2 hour train ride from Oslo. First of all, when you come on to a new team its a little uncomfortable, throw not being comfortable in the language and already feeling self conscious and it can be a little disasterous. So with the result I have felt so nervous at practice in a way that I haven’t, in a really long time. I’m going through this a little as well on my new team that I am playing with in matches–self-conscious because of the fact that I have a little bit of a hard time understanding Norwegian, although I understand Danish, which should be close enough. Anyways, I have had a little bit of a tough time overcoming my biggest obstacle at this stage, which right now is myself and the thoughts I am choosing to put in my head. But that’s where sometimes soccer is such a great thing, because it provides an outlet to help ourselves learn how to better ourselves in life as well….and like everything else I’ve found a way to overcome to this point, I believe that I can get through this.

I’m Baaaa-ckkkk :)

I’m not much of a blog writer, but my friend who is a genious at all things blog related advised me one time that its good to separate blogs and not to be long winded, as I can be sometimes famous for!

So see, I told you, you wouldn’t have to wait long for my next blog update! It only took me about five minutes.

So I ended my last post with a quote from my favourite poem, “Don’t Quit”. Anyone who has known me through the last few years, well actually since way back in the day, has known that my road has not been an easy one. I could probably rival the Pacific with the size of the ocean I have cried in disappointment because of something soccer-related. To be blunt, I had a year in soccer that was completely disappointing. My experience in Norway wasn’t what I had hoped; partly it was my fault, as I arrived out of soccer shape because of the lack of high level soccer opportunities in Vancouver, and getting a major tournament organized, and I also felt like my coach didn’t give me a fair shake to prove myself and I felt there was a lack of communication which didn’t help.

I went to Ottawa, excited for the season and the role that I would be playing as captain. To make a long story short, and one that I still don’t really understand, after having a great first weekend where I got my first award in soccer since I was 7 (ok maybe I have had one or two since then) and was named to the W League Team of the Week, I was told to sit out a week to rest injuries that I had picked up in Norway. To make a very long story short, I didn’t get my spot back after that and was told that it was because I needed to be ready for our final playoff weekend and to just trust the coach. Without needing to go into it too much more, I ended up playing 10 minutes that weekend, was never spoken to by the coach, after being told to trust him 2 weeks before, and I was absolutely crushed, even more so that we lost the Conference Final.

I thankfully had a great week in Tahoe with my favourite cousins, aunt and uncle, and pondered if it was worth continuing on with soccer, if it just seemed to continue to bring me so much misery. I thought about it, and asked myself honestly if I was at the stage myself as a player where I gave coaches no point but to play me, and looking at it honestly, I knew I could be much fitter, and I knew mentally that I could be alot more positive with myself. I told myself that I would give myself 6 months to work on those 2 things, and if after 6 more months I still wasn’t enjoying it, that I could quit and walk away from the sport I had worked so hard for.

I went back to Vancouver, and at lunch time one of the days, I went home to grab lunch on our break and had an email from the Irish National Team Coach, inviting me to my first official National Team training camp at the end of August. I was so surprised, but so happy that I had made fitness a priority and felt like I was in the kind of shape to handle it.

I went totally prepared, and I made the team and had a whole new world of opportunity open up for me! The best part about it, was knowing at that crucial moment when I thought about stopping, that I decided to push myself as hard as I could, one more time, and that ended up being what helped me reach my dream of playing internationally.

I received my first international cap against the US in Philadelphia September 13, and earned myself a starting role and 90 minutes against the US at Giants Stadium on September 17 in front of some of my closest friends who had witnessed my journey for so long, and favourite family. 

It was an experience I will never forget and one that will always be a reminder to me, that ”its when you are hardest hit, that you mustn’t quit”

Oops, I Did It Again

I apologize to anyone who has been waiting for blog post number 2. I guess I lied when I said that this time I was going to do a better job updating it

Well, there is a mere 3 months to catch up on! So I’ll do my best.

On the girlsCAN front, we had an awesome Elite Camp in the Summer with about 25 motivated high school players, some of whom flew in from Alberta for the 3 day session. 3 of my absolute favourite people and coaches were there to help run the sessions–Ash, Ceilidh and Joy came all the way in from Florida to help out for the week and more importantly have an excuse to hang out in Vancouver! I dont think there is anything I enjoy more than working with girls who just want so badly to get better and reach their potential. We had great weather and a great week. We’re just in the midst of getting 2009 planned for the College Prep Program and have some awesome things in the works that we hope continues to open up doors for those girls who are dying to go through them and see where their hard work with soccer can lead them.

For me personally it was quite a journey this year. There is this poem called Don’t Quit that I have read religiously through the ups and downs of my own soccer career, so needless to say there has been far more downs than ups and my paper with the poem on it is a little well worn The last few lines of the paragraph was strangely prophetic to what happened to me this year and how things ended up:

And you never can tell how close you are, It might be near when it seems afar. So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit. Its when things seem worst that you mustn’t quit.

I guess you’ll have to keep reading to find out what happened!

 

Let’s Get It Started

So here we go again, as I attempt to get this blog started. Persistence is one of our key values with girlsCAN and I plan on keeping this going. I’m Ciara, the founder of girlsCAN. Not sure, who if anyone will be joining us on the adventures of reading this blog. Its going to be a mixture though. My observations and experiences as I still experience the ‘beautiful game’ as a player, updates as to what is going on with girlsCAN, funny stories that happen along the way.

After a very busy year with girlsCAN, where I would say our biggest accomplishment was overcoming many obstacles in pulling off the very first “Western Canada Soccer Showcase” in March. A few days later, I left for Norway, specifically Asker, a suburb of Oslo, where I had the opportunity to play for one of the top teams in the Toppserien league. My first week there was spent at the famed training grounds of “La Manga” in Spain, where under 25 degree temperatures, I had the chance to do 2 a days with some of the top players from around the world, including my favourite Norwegian player, Lise Klaveness, and the Danish captain Katrine Pedersen, and a number of other unbelievable players. I watched Asker play on TV a few years ago when I was playing in Denmark, and always had it in my mind that I wanted to play for them, so in a way I was realizing one of my dreams. Fast forward a couple of months later, and now I am in Ottawa playing for the W League Fury. We’re gearing up for our conference playoffs which we will have in a few weeks and most likely will be facing FC Indiana, a team with many of our Ottawa teammates from last season. Should be interesting!

On the girlsCAN front, we have tons of exciting stuff coming up, that I can’t wait to get going on. We have the highest registration we have ever had for our girlsCAN Summer Camp and team camps, our programs lined up for the fall, with an awesome, motivated and motivating staff who have proved themselves over the last 2 years to be unbelievably capable.  We’re continuing to plan our work with the elite high school females, with a camp in August, and lots of great stuff planned over the next few months, as we gear up for the second annual, WC Showcase.

Tons of great stuff coming up. We look forward to taking you along for the ride!!