A Dedicated Team
by: William Sheehan '10
Most people think of Mount St. Michael Academy as a school of excellence. This excellence is shown through academics, as well as our athleticism in sports. When you look at our football, basketball, wrestling, and track teams, you see that excellence. The thing is it can leave some of our other less known teams in the dark. This can be said about our soccer team. Even so it does not minimize the commitment and morale of a team who can be able to show its greatness as much as any other team even though we may lack the trophies or the popularity and support of this great sport.
It was not always easy at first though, such as when we first met for practice in August. We were out of shape, and we had to really work on our practices to just to get in shape as well as learn skills and refine them. Also most of our juniors and seniors never played their freshman year and not everyone has proper experience and knowledge of soccer when they joined the team. This lack of experience gave some of the higher-level teams, like Spellman, an advantage over us. Though we had disadvantages we still were looking forward to the coming season, but it would not be easy.
Our first game we played against was Cardinal Spellman; the best team in the division. The final score, 7-0, definitely reflected their high skill level. This first defeat discouraged us and the next game or two we lost as well. We won a fair number of games but lost a good number of games that can have ended up a win if we played harder in the second half or did a different play that sided in our favor. It seems that most games can have unpredictability to what team will win, which shows that any team can win a game and that you and your team can affect the outcome.
There were a number of good aspects of our season as well. First of all, we were awarded more penalty kicks than the other teams in our division and we got them by working hard and putting the pressure on the opposing team to make the mistakes and to get the chances. Penalties were the bulk of goals we made in the beginning of the season and they helped us out of some tight situations, like our first season win against our rival Cardinal Spellman, from a last minute effort from our team, that resulted a 2-1 win that could have easily been a 1-1 draw. The second was our later season that we as a team started to click and started to get better results and more goals that especially were reflected in our last two games we played. The first was our second encounter with Cardinal Spellman and even though we lost again, we played much better and harder. We were rewarded by scoring the only real goal by a team in our division against Spellman. Then our first and only playoff game was considered our best game in our season, because even though we lost, we all played our very best through the whole game. It was a very close game.
Now that the season is over our team sees those two games not as losses but how to model on how we should play every game next season, except win more games than lose. With a talented team and dedication to Coaches Aromando and Dickson, we learned how far we came since our first meeting in August. If you are thinking of joining the team and either you are coming as a freshman or you're already in this school we are looking for the person that has the passion and love for soccer. You must have the intent on always working hard and to stick to it for the season at good times as well as the hard times. Soccer is one of the ultimate team sports and it is important to do what you can for the team and more importantly, have fun. The team is already looking forward to the next season and hope to see you either at the soccer field or at the bleachers rooting for the home team.
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