College Athletics Reality Check #1 - There is No Offseason

Junior Nina Carter

By Nina Carter - Women's Soccer
April 10, 2012

The Titans women's soccer team has been hard at work even though we are technically in our “offseason”. College athletics reality check #1: There is no such thing as an offseason. Since we play in the fall and typically that lasts until mid-November depending how far we go in tournament play, the majority of the school year is left preparing for the following season. Just because we don't have any games doesn't mean we're not playing. A typical week of training for the women's soccer team consists of 7 AM conditioning and weightlifting on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45-1:45 PM practices on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 10:15 PM futsal games on Wednesday nights. For those of you who don't know what futsal is, it is a game of soccer played in a gym with a smaller and heavier ball. Futsal is aimed to develop player's ball control, and let me tell you these games can get pretty competitive.

Initially we had three spring games scheduled, U of M, Madonna, and Northwood. On February 12^th we travelled to Ann Arbor to face the Wolverines and were interested to see how we matched up to the Big 10 school. The game was a high intensity fast-paced game but we kept up and showed that we are not to be taken lightly. Our second spring game was against Madonna who we had various opportunities to score on during the game but we used it as an opportunity to play. against a local program. Our game against Northwood was rescheduled twice due to the crazy weather we have been experiencing and unfortunately we were not able to play them this spring season.

We still have conditioning twice a week along with other individual workouts. As the school year draws to a close, the team prepares to move back home which ranges from Thunder Bay Ontario to Toronto to Virginia to the very suburbs of Detroit. This doesn't mean a break from soccer though because now it is time to start preparing for the rigorous preseason in August that will come much too quickly for some. Because in all reality there is no offseason, no such thing as “down-time”, because when one season ends, the next begins.