Soccer Player Blog

Entry #1 - Head Coach Marcia Oliveira

Hello there,

I am pleased to announce that we will be able to write about our program in 2009 and offer more insights about it in a blog.

I am inviting some players to write a summary for a blog on our athletics site to reach you and entertain your day while at the same time giving you an idea of the seriousness of our work toward excellence in academics and in soccer.

It is very nice to take advantage of what the technological world can offer increasing our level of communication and interaction with others within the university, to our family and friends away, to our prospective student-athletes, and our fans.

I will summarize here a little about our first part of the spring semester since we started our spring training on January 19, 2009.

We got off to strong start with strength and conditioning and a new schedule of training. We also have higher frequency of work than in the past springs. It has been interesting to see our journey and the results from our training before the spring break. It has been challenging to adjust to a focused student-athlete life style, where, as it says, to maintain a focus on academics and in training.

Our daily, Monday to Friday, 6:30 a.m. training gave us a bit of challenge of adaptation for the team and the coaching staff. Our early schedule seeks mainly a quality of work instead of quantity. We have averaged about 10 hours of week in training leaving the rest of the day and weekends to academic work and personal care. We are looking on getting a balanced daily schedule of our priorities. Number one priority: Academics.

Myself and the coaching staff are happy to see that we are improving in every area and that our student-athletes are finding better ways to achieve their goals and the program expectations as they grow into Division I student-athletes.

Although it still a work in progress, we have seen great promises of achievement to a higher level of competition and academic work. The girls have been working very hard in conditioning, weight training, and soccer training through the use of futsal (FIFA official indoor soccer sport). We are focused on increasing our strength and conditioning to meet the demands of the sport, strengthening our bodies to perform better and avoid injures. We have an expanded study table hours, kept a good mentoring and grade check system with the help of David Lorenz and Becky Flynn-Jensen who have been great on giving us the tools to be solid in our academics.

We have invited other professionals from our university and community to speak to our players about other areas of attention that goes beyond academics and training. We had the visit of Mary Auch, a nutritionist, early this month and we are scheduling other professionals to come to share important facts of their expertise that will help our student-athletes to make educated and smart choices when they are not in class or in training.

We held a futsal/indoor soccer camp to our community kids and we had an indoor tournament in February. Coach Russell and Coach Youds were fundamental to get this two project started and accomplished. The tournament was a good way to get us back on the collective mode as a team and we are holding another one this month. We will finish the spring training with two away soccer games against University of Kansas and South Dakota State on April 18 and 25 respectively.

To finalize, I want to invite you to read our blogging and visiting our team web site at www.usdsoccer.com

I hope you are having a wonderful first semester of the year. We will keep you posted.

Take care, God bless you always.

Coach Oliveira :-)

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