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Soccer Banter

Fulfilling a Promise - Part I

11/12/2012

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I want to fill everyone in on our recent result following our trip to the MAAC tournament 2 weekends ago. We finished up our regular season 8-1 in the conference and 11-5-2 overall. We shared the regular season title with Marist (also 8-1) and secured the 2nd seed in the conference tournament and we were slated to play Loyola University of Maryland in the first conference semifinal game. I wish more than anything I could tell you that we won that game and went on to play and win the MAAC championship game, but things don’t always happen the way you plan or hope them to, and we lost a hard-fought semi-final game 1-0. While we might have lost our chance at becoming MAAC champions and reaching the NCAA tournament, this isn’t a blog about loss or failure but rather one of reflection and hope for the future.   

Our Associate Head Coach, Sean Driscoll, has a special ritual before every conference game. He diligently puts together small, laminated quotes (carefully color coordinated with the colors of the opposing team we will be playing) and hands each member of our team the small strip of inspiration before kickoff. I have a ritual with these quotes. Usually I take it and read it once and then tuck it away in my left sock underneath my shinguard to keep it in place while I play. I then usually take it out at halftime, reread the message, and put it back. As many of you know by now, I love quotes and Sean’s pregame ritual is one that I (and all of my teammates) truly cherish. The quote before our semifinal game against Loyola, read: “How hard would you play today, if you knew you could not play tomorrow?” And I guess that’s where this blog really starts….



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I changed my routine when Sean handed me this quote before we took the field 2 Fridays ago. This time, instead of tucking the quote away in my sock, I purposely put it inside the left side of my sports bra, the place that was physically closest to my heart. I promised myself before the game that I was going to literally take this quote to heart and that by the end of the game, I would literally have to crawl off the field because I would be so exhausted from working as hard as I possibly could to help my team. Even if the game grew to be out of reach and it was going to inevitably be my last soccer game ever, I swore to myself that I’d leave everything out on the field and leave that game with absolutely no regrets.  100% effort for as long as it took. That’s what I was prepared to give. That’s what I wanted to give. That’s just not what happened.

Fast-forward about 44 minutes and everything changed. It was a free kick in Loyola’s end, I honestly don’t remember why. Could have been a foul, might have been offside; either way, it was an opportunity for Loyola to drive the ball back into our half and try to spring an offensive attack. I hadn’t been having the best game up to that point. The details of the first 44 minutes are still admittedly fuzzy, but I knew I just wasn’t doing everything I needed to do to help my team win the game. I needed to give more. This free kick was a chance for me to help my team and hopefully drive the ball back into Loyola’s half and attempt one last offensive threat before halftime. I remember the kick being a bit shorter than I expected it to be and I knew that since I was goal side of my mark that I would have to try to jump a little higher so I could get my head up and over hers to hopefully get to the ball first and still have time to fall backward and avoid fouling her. What’s that saying? I guess timing really is everything.

It’s ironic that my collegiate career would end on the kind of play I’ve come to define myself by throughout my entire soccer career. Free kicks, corner kicks, goal kicks, punts, long throw-ins-- They are the plays that can dictate and change the course of a game and they involve one of my biggest roles on my team, winning balls in the air. I’m not the most physically imposing player and I don’t think my athleticism is anything all that special, but I have always seemed to have a knack for timing and a competitive nature that makes me a pretty influential ball-winner on the field. I’ve always known that going up for 50/50 challenges in the air could result in injuries, and I have certainly taken some knocks over the years, but I never thought the last time I’d wear my Fairfield uniform that it would end up covered in blood. A simple mistimed challenge on a play that I have probably done thousands of times in my life. And just like that, it was all over.



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With a concussion and a laceration above my left eye that would later require a dozen stitches, it was pretty clear that that there was no way I would be able to return to the game. I was advised to go to the local ER to get immediate treatment but there was no way I was going to miss watching my team emerge from a scoreless halftime and find a way to win the game. I was confident that we were the better team and that things would go our way and that we would battle our way into the Finals. Loyola ended up scoring a little over halfway through the second half on a header off a free kick. Despite our persistent effort to equalize, the game would end this way and ironically enough, the same kind of play that had prematurely ended my career a half earlier would come to prematurely end our season and the careers of my fellow seniors as well.

The pain I felt of sitting on the sideline completely powerless to do anything to help my team win that game is something I’m not sure I will ever really get over. How do you make sense of having everything you’ve worked your entire collegiate career for just get ripped away from you in an instant? How am I supposed to accept the fact that I didn’t get to leave everything I had out on that field and I didn’t get to battle with teammates until the very end? Why did it all end like that? These questions probably don’t have answers, but they do bring about lessons, perspectives, and personal resolutions.

One of my absolute favorite quotes of all time is the following:

"I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, after all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.”



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Almost exactly four years ago, I was given an opportunity. I was offered a spot on Fairfield University’s Women’s Soccer team and I was granted the ability to extend my soccer career at the Division 1 collegiate level. I wasn’t promised money or a starting position or even a minute of playing time, but I was promised a chance. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about opportunities in the past 4 years, it’s that the opportunities you are given go hand in hand with the choices that you make, and those choices ultimately define how your opportunities pan out. When given the chance to do something, become something, achieve something, you have to make the choice to control everything you can control to make sure you make the most out of the opportunity you’ve been given. Work ethic, determination, heart, leadership, desire, competitiveness, hustle—these are all commonly referred to in athletics as “intangibles,” or the inherent qualities in players that can be identified but not easily measured or quantified. In the game of soccer, a player cannot rely solely on these qualities in order to achieve success, but they cannot become the best players and teammates they can possibly be without them. These intangibles have helped define the choices (on and off the field) that I have made over the past 4 years in response to the opportunity I was given. There were days that I definitely fell short of my best and days I could have done things differently or given a little more, but overall, these intangible qualities that got me to where I am today and are what I hope will continue to drive me toward who I will become in the future.

I was given the chance to be a part of a team for 4 years and as it stands now, I technically still have 6 months left of that opportunity. The typical protocol in college soccer is that you begin your collegiate career in the fall of your freshman year and finish your career after your last game of the fall of your senior year. Maybe that’s what is normally done, but I guess I tend to do things a little outside the realm of normality. I promised myself the summer before my freshman year that despite the fact that I was an unknown, last-minute recruit with no great expectations laid out for me, that I would end my career at Fairfield knowing I had made a meaningful impact on the program. Most players might dream of All-American accolades or a national championship, but I wrote one thing on my summer workout packet that I received the summer before my first collegiate season: “MAKE AN IMPACT.” I guess you could say that at the end of it all, I wanted “to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that [I] lived and [played] at all.” I wanted to leave knowing I pushed myself and my teammates as hard as I possibly could and that I did everything I could to help myself and my teammates be the best players we could be. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not done doing that yet. The opportunity to improve and better my teammates and myself isn’t over yet and I know in my heart that the right thing to do is to make the most out of the time I have left and fulfill the promises I made to end things here at Fairfield University the right way. Whether I will have the chance to play professionally one day remains to be seen, but right now I’m looking forward to continuing to pursue greatness this offseason with my teammates.

To be continued…

‎"Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible."

Go Stags!

Breathe Battle. Believe.

L. Reilly



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My Search for Meaning

10/24/2012

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In his acclaimed novella, “Seize the Day,” Nobel Prize winning author Saul Bellow remarked, “You can’t march in a straight line to victory. You fluctuate toward it.”

Over the course of our regular season, we have had our ups and downs. We have had decisive victories, shocking losses, and some games that fell somewhere in between. We have faced our share of adversity this season, but we have emerged from our defeats and our struggles as a united and determined family that is well on our way to achieving our postseason goals. With two final conference games left, we sit atop the standings as tied for first in the MAAC with a record of 6-1. Our home game this Friday will be against St. Peter’s College and it will serve as our official “Senior Night” in which myself and 5 of my fellow classmates will be honored before kickoff.  While this night will be a great celebration of the careers of 6 members of the class of 2013, it will also serve as a reminder to me of one member of Fairfield’s 2013 graduating class that will not be in attendance that night.

I officially met Julia Sill on June 22nd, 2009. It was Fairfield’s freshman orientation and we greeted each other that morning like we had been best friends for years. I guess that makes sense considering we had met over Facebook a few months prior and had been calling/texting/skyping/emailing/IMing each other nonstop since we first found each other on a random roommate survey forum on Facebook. It’s pretty safe to say I loved the girl from the start. I could sit here and ramble off a bunch of adjectives that could attempt to characterize the type of person Julia was, but the truth is, it wasn’t necessarily her identifiable character traits that drew me in, it was the person I became when I was around her.  It was the feeling of the profound personal growth and progress that she brought out in me. She challenged me to want more and to be more and to expect more from myself. For lack of a better cliché, Julia changed my life.



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Julia was not a collegiate athlete and had no ties to the soccer team other than living with myself and another girl that was on our team (Nikki Stark ’13). Ever the comedian, Julia would constantly make fun of me for being “the most competitive freak on the planet” or purposely try to annoy me by challenging me to meaningless competitions that she knew I had no time for, but wouldn’t back down from (example: who could rap the Twista part of Kanye West’s “Slow Jamz” the fastest—she always won). She liked to push my buttons and get me “All Reiled Up!” as she would say. The banter was fun and Julia could take it just as well as she could give it, but there was much, much more to her than her lively, hilarious exterior.  Julia and I were both night owls and we would spend most nights  (well, early mornings in our case) talking seriously about our lives, our goals, our fears, our insecurities, and our futures. It’s like we both had this switch that would go on late at night that would Jekyll and Hyde us from our normal daytime personas to our nighttime Dr. Phil alter egos.  She would tell me to be more relaxed and outgoing, to let go of things in my past and to believe in myself and in my capabilities.  I would tell her to open up more and take more risks with her heart; to not always try to please everyone and to be true to who she really was. We spent countless nights like this, sharing and advising, revealing and dreaming, and it’s the memories of these DMCs (Deep Meaningful Conversations) as we called them, that I will cherish the most about my time spent with her. She helped me understand who I was and what I wanted to be; most days I wish I could have given her half of what she gave me.

“If this were someone else, and I thought it would help, I would say take some time to yourself and take some time off, away from soccer. But I don’t think that’s the best thing for you. I think you need to be here…be around the team.”

This is what my Head Coach, Jim O’Brien said to me one early January morning of my sophomore year. It was three days after Julia had taken her own life in her empty dorm room on campus and it was minutes after I had prematurely ran out of our winter beep test (that was being held inside in the Athletic Center gym) hysterically crying and unable to contain my grief. The spring season (especially the beginning of it) prioritizes fitness and emphasizes the physical development of our players. Fitness has always kind of been my thing and I have always somewhat prided myself on my ability to help motivate and push my teammates to get through even the most grueling of fitness sessions. I heard Jim’s words but I didn’t know how to respond to them. I didn’t think I was emotionally capable to do what I felt I was supposed to do to help my teammates. I felt completely lost and helpless and I didn’t know how I was going to pick myself up and get myself through the rest of the semester. Jim had an answer for that too. “Just show up,” I remember him telling me. “Just keep showing up every day and eventually it will get easier.” 



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So that’s what I did. Through the sleepless nights, the endless crying, the constant guilt, I kept showing up every morning at 6am for spring workouts. Most days were tough, and I continuously struggled to cope with the shock, anger, sadness, and guilt of losing one of my best friends to such a tragic fate, but I had a team of people who rallied around me and got me through each and every day and got me closer and closer to the acceptance and relative peace I have now currently procured.

I’d be lying to you if I told you that when I look out at the stands on Friday night and see my friends and family supporting me that I won’t feel the pain of her absence in that crowd. I’ll miss the signs she used to make at home games and the congratulatory texts she would send after our big wins.  Hell, I’ll even miss her making fun of me after games when I would angrily rehash every mistake I made and every chance I missed. I guess mostly, I’ll just miss my friend.

It’s interesting how losses teach us meaningful lessons about how to better approach our futures. Losing people, losing time, losing games, losing ourselves- they all challenge us to rise from emotional, physical, and psychological defeats and to move onto something better, something that we believe is truly worth fighting as hard as we possibly can for. Well I know who and what I am fighting for on Friday, on Sunday, and for the remainder of our season. I am fighting to honor the memory of my beautiful, inspiring, compassionate friend who left us far too soon. I am fighting for everyone that has always supported, loved, and believed in me without any obvious reason to. And I am fighting to do everything I possibly can to ensure the continued success of my amazing team.
 


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To quote Viktor Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which was given to me by one of my former Fairfield coaches, Susie Starr, as an aid to help me cope with Julia’s loss,

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person [or persons] other than oneself."

It is my hope that as my senior year comes to a close, I will be able to help contribute to our postseason success by dedicating myself completely to play for the people that I love and for the person I will always cherish and remember.



In Memory of Julia Ryder Sill

May 28, 1991 — January 18, 2011


Go Stags!

Breathe. Battle. Believe.

L. Reilly

For more information dedicated to raising awareness about mental health among college students, please utilize www.activeminds.org

For more information regarding Fairfield University’s Chapter of the National Alliance of Mental Health, please contact renata@nami.org 

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Building Momentum

10/5/2012

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“The only way that we can live is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed.”

In my last blog, I talked about the concept of change and its importance in the spectrum of overcoming underachievement and failure and reaching meaningful success. I said that our team was at a turning point in our season and I truly felt that the way we handled ourselves in the midst of a bad final out-of-conference loss and a mediocre start to the season, would come to define our team and dictate how the rest of the season would unfold for us.  Well, I am happy to be sitting here writing to you with news that we bounced back this past weekend and opened up conference play with two wins (against Rider and Loyola, respectively). Rider was 5-1-2 heading into our game with them; We hadn’t beaten Loyola in the regular season for more than a decade. So how did the momentum shift? How did we manage to grow and change and learn and win after being beaten and exposed? We worked.

To steal a line from one of my all-time favorite movies, Remember the Titans, “Attitude reflects leadership.” In the hierarchy of influence within the framework of a collegiate soccer team, the coaching staff assumes the primary leadership role and they are supported and supplemented by their selected captains. When a team is at a turning point in their season, leadership becomes paramount. It’s easy to handle a team and motivate players when things are going well. It’s much more difficult to stay upbeat and help inspire positive change when things are not working out as planned and when efforts to improve go unrequited. When we arrived back at Fairfield after our last out of conference game before MAAC play (a 4-1 loss to Fordham), the coaching staff met with me and my fellow senior captains and demanded change, improvement, effort, and accountability. They let us know that things needed to be better or this season and our senior year was going to be lost.



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Our Associate Head Coach, Sean Driscoll, followed these post-game sentiments with a motivating and passionate speech to the team the following morning that resulted in an almost immediate attitude change from every member of the team and included an impromptu, voluntary team training session on what was supposed to be a day off. Everyone wanted to get better and knew that the upcoming week of training would be vital in setting the tone with how we were going to enter conference play. The following morning was another test in our commitment to improve and it included a grueling track workout consisting of completing 9 timed 400m sprints. The next several days of practice were competitive and constructive and each training session seemed intent on improving our weaknesses - namely making us more dynamic in our attack and more focused in our finishing. To top it off, each training session ended with Coach Driscoll doing extra work with us to improve everything from our basic shooting technique to finishing off crosses to 3-man combination play in the attacking third to extra work on set pieces. Our week of training was extremely productive and we went into Friday’s game against Rider with a statement to make about our team’s abilities.

Coach O’Brien said before our game that the “theme” of the weekend had to be mental toughness. We had to be tenacious in our pursuit of success and stay determined but composed in high-pressure situations. The results of the games that followed this pregame talk were a direct indication that we understood the meaning of mental toughness and we were ready to use it to change the course of our season.



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We scored in the final 40 seconds of regulation time against Rider to win 1-0; We scored first against Loyola - gave up an equalizer - and then responded by scoring the decisive goal less than 2 minutes later. What’s interesting to note about the goals that were scored in these games is not the quality of shots that we took that resulted in important finishes - but rather how and when these vital scoring opportunities came into fruition.  The goal against Rider came with less than a minute before overtime at a point in the game where both teams were exhausted. While in past games we have let games drag on into extra minutes and left the field with a draw, this game was different in that we pushed through our fatigue, went on the attack, and finished the game off in the final minute before Rider could get a chance to regroup in overtime. The goal came off a strong effort by junior forward Carly Beyar to create space for herself and rip a shot on goal. While the initial effort was saved, junior Jac Ley found the energy to follow the rebound and emphatically finish the loose ball into the net. Our goals against Loyola came first from a breakaway by sophomore, Ashley Small, (assisted by Carly Beyar) a few minutes after Ashley had failed to finish a similar scoring attempt. Ashley didn’t let a previous setback deter her from finishing her next opportunity and just like that, we were up 1-0. Loyola got back into the game with a great goal of their own, but less than two minutes later, we responded with a great header goal by sophomore, Erin Petterson, that came off a combination between our center midfielder, outside back, and opposite outside midfielder. We had practiced that exact pattern of play countless times in practice, and we composed ourselves and executed the play to a tee, resulting in a 2-1 victory.

Sometimes you have to take a few steps back to get that running start toward the success that you want. We certainly have had our setbacks this year but the important thing is how we have responded to them. We are 2-0 in conference, working hard, and staying focused. We have all the momentum we could want heading into 2 huge conference games at home and with determined effort and mental toughness, I’m expecting great things.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to updating you after our important weekend of games against Niagara University and Canisius College.

Go Stags!

Breathe. Battle. Believe.

L. Reilly


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Break to Build

9/24/2012

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Change - (verb) - to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc., of (something) different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone.

From a purely quantitative standpoint, my college career can be summed up in three numbers-  26-27-15.

How does the meaning of the word “change” and those three numbers (that indicate my overall record as a Fairfield Stag) relate to each other? They don’t; and therein lies the problem.

As a competitive athlete, it’s a difficult thing to realize that you have spent your entire collegiate career being average. That your contributions have led to zero playoff wins, zero championships, and no winning seasons. It’s difficult to think that you’ve let down the people that believed in you. It’s difficult to believe that you’ve never reached your potential.

Every year you say it’s going to be different. You enter every preseason prepared, confident, and motivated. You start off okay. You may win a few games. You may have some good performances….But then you lose. Then your performances start to level off. You get down on yourself. You start losing more games. You start playing worse. Things begin to fall apart and before you even realize it, more than half the season is gone and you’re wondering how you let everything go so downhill. If you’re lucky enough to get a playoff spot at this point, you swear you’ll make the most of it. You promise that you won’t let another season end in failure. But then just like that, you’re sitting on a bus ride home, wishing more than anything you could go back to that moment in the season when you could have turned it all around. That moment, that game, that performance, that negative mindset that you could have used to say, “enough is enough” and CHANGED the outcome of your season.



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The above feelings and thoughts are what I have experienced the past three seasons and I refuse to spend another year of my life lying awake at night and wondering why I never had the willpower to help change the seemingly scripted, average, chronic outcome that has plagued my team for the past three years.   

I look back at all the reasons why I feel we have fallen short these past few years and I realize that when it comes down to it - we just haven’t collectively, as a team, given enough. We haven’t worked hard enough. We haven’t pushed each other enough. We haven’t demanded enough from each other. We haven’t wanted it enough. There’s a saying that goes, “We can’t become what we need to be by remaining what we are,” and I couldn’t agree more with that. This season, our record, our performances, our fate, isn’t going to turn around by itself. We aren’t going to win a championship by just wanting to win games. We need to work and push and change and progress so that we are able to couple our desire to win with actually deserving to win and ultimately earn what we want: a MAAC championship, NCAA tournament wins, and a history-making season. 


I look back at all the confidence I had in my last blog and I think about all the goals and aspirations I had for our team this season and I realize something: They are still there. Was a 3-3-2 record heading into conference play how I had originally planned for our season to start out? No. Am I happy with my personal performance in those 8 games so far? Absolutely not. Do I expect more from my teammates and from myself moving forward? Yes. But all stories have turning points and all seasons have defining moments and the direction those points and moments lead us to are 100% in our control. In seasons past, we have watched these moments pass us by and we have decided to stay average; to just go through the motions of the season and let opportunities for positive change fall by the wayside. That cannot and will not happen this year.


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Renowned American author and poet, Maya Angelou, once wrote, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”

I love my team, I love my coaches, I love my school, and I love this game. If I can do anything this season, I hope that above all-else, I can prove all of those things. Every day that I am surrounded by my talented teammates and dedicated coaches I realize that I can’t help but be optimistic for our future this season; that it’s not too late. We may be nearing our halfway point in the season, but I believe we haven’t even gotten started in showing the country what we’re capable of. We are down but far from out. We are rising toward a new and different fate than the past few years and I can’t wait to work toward the start of it all this coming weekend.

I look forward to checking back in with you all after we begin conference play this weekend at Rider University and Loyola University.

Go Stags!

Breathe. Battle. Believe.

L. Reilly 



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Looking Back, Moving Forward

8/28/2012

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Hey Everyone!

My name is Lauren Reilly and I am a senior captain for the Fairfield University Women’s Soccer team. I am fortunate enough to have been given the chance to share my personal thoughts, insights, and experiences with you all while chronicling my fourth and final season as a Fairfield Stag and I could not be more excited for the opportunity.

I guess I want to start this blog off with a little bit about me and my hopes for this upcoming season (Note: This blog and the many to come will involve plenty of quotes and clichés so bear with me…).

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage.”



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Back in high school, I had plenty of coaches tell me I didn’t have what it took to make it at the Division 1 level. I was an athlete, but not a soccer player. I didn’t have that “thing” college coaches were looking for. I didn’t stand out on the field. I wasn’t a “blue chip” prospect. My dreams of playing high-level college soccer were viewed as an “unrealistic stretch.”  While I achieved some local success in high school as both a forward and goalkeeper, I never really made a name for myself or became a sought-after recruit amongst national college coaches. I had been in contact with a few coaches throughout my junior and senior year, but as soon as I thought I had found the school for me, things would fall apart and I’d be back at square one. I’m an extremely competitive and self-driven person and despite all of these setbacks and dead ends and the people along the way that would say they “told me so,” somehow I kept the faith that there would be a coach out there that was willing to take a chance on me. Someone willing to believe that there was something in me worth investing in. I found that person and that program in Coach Jim O’Brien and Fairfield University.

Of the many wonderful things I can say about Jim and Fairfield University, the one thing I can’t express enough is my gratitude for him, my other coaches, my teammates, and the institution as a whole. I used to be the type of person that was extremely driven by the prospect of proving people wrong, of silencing the critics. I approached the game with a chip on my shoulder and a desire to turn all the skeptics into believers. I entered college with that mindset but I sit here 3 years later and realize that proving people wrong isn’t what drives me anymore. What truly motivates me are not the critics, but the believers. My motivators are not found in the people in my past who never thought I’d make it, they are found in my coaches, my teammates, my family, and my friends who all helped ensure that I did. My supporters, the people who invested in me and my abilities and never looked back; The people who believed in me when I didn’t even believe in myself; Those are the people that drive me and inspire me every single day to be the best possible player, leader, and person I can me. I play for those people because I owe them everything and I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. I sit here today in a position that I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be in. I am a part of an amazing team with teammates I can call my best friends, coaches I can call esteemed mentors, in a school I can call a second home.  I really have been given everything, and now, with one year left, I need to find a way to give a little more of myself and help this program go a littler further than it ever has before.



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So, my goals for this season? Simple. Make history. We have everything it takes to be the best team in program history and I can’t wait for the season to start so we can begin our run toward a MAAC Regular Season title, MAAC Championship title, and a few NCAA tournament wins - something that’s never been done here at Fairfield.

I guess more than anything, I just want this team to reach and then exceed its potential.  I want all of my teammates to expect more from themselves and then achieve more than they thought possible. I want this team to set the bar as high as we possibly can so we can walk off the field after our last game this year and know that the program will be held to higher standard the following fall.

So go ahead and call us a long-shot, don’t rank us, underestimate us, tell us we’re wrong; just don’t be surprised if the Fairfield Stags ignore the critics, embrace the believers, and have the courage to “map out a course of action and follow it” straight toward a few upsets in the NCAA Tournament come November.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to checking back in after our first 2 games of the season against the University of New Hampshire and the University of Vermont.

Go Stags!

Breathe. Battle. Believe.

L. Reilly



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    Lauren Reilly

    Reilly is a senior captain at Fairfield University, playing in the midfield or as a forward.  In 2011, she was selected All-MAAC Second Team and All-MAAC Academic Team.  This past summer she played for New England Mutiny in WPSL Elite.  Off the field, she is an English major.



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Soccer Banter: Been Kicking Since March 1, 2011