Aug. 30, 2002
On the game
Stanford has played in five matches before today and that was our first match, so that only is going to make it a struggle for us, but when you add on top of it that we have three of our starting players with our Under 19 National Team, not here with us, throw in a couple of injuries and throw in that we are unveiling our national championship banner today, which I think is highly motivating for the opponent, this result is kind of what I expected.
I told a lot of people privately not wanting my team to know how I felt, that they had a real good chance to get rocked today and we did. Today after the game I talked about how rough our start is going to be, but it's not who is good now, but who is good in November and every year we are good in November. I have tremendous confidence in our group that we will be good in November again this year.
I can be that way because this is what I expected. If I didn't expect it I would be in shock or upset and I'm not because this is kind of what I expected. If you consider that they have played five matches and they have had the extra weeks of training, consider that we are missing a number of our players and consider that we are missing some real key leaders. It's not like we graduated a couple of seniors, we graduated Danielle Slaton. She is the defender of the year in the WUSA. She is a starting National Team player, probably one of the best leaders that I have ever coached. Another first round draft choice defender is Anna Kraus and another team captain Kerry Cathcart, so it's not like we just graduated a couple seniors, we graduated some key players, key defensive players. So, I think we knew it was going to be a rough start, and I thought maybe the team could score a couple of goals, but this is not too far off from what I expected so I'm not in a state of shock about it.
On Moving On
What we have to do starting tomorrow, is working towards our chance of playing in the playoffs. Everyday when we are out there training we think about that opportunity. I guarantee it is going to come up at the end of the season, us playing Stanford in the playoffs. We have additional motivation now to work our butts off so that we can have another crack at these guys in the NCAA playoffs when it counts in November, and prove what I have always said to be true, that we are the toughest team in the country in November and we proved that last year, and we have proved it in the past and I'm sure we'll prove it again this year.
On the record attending crowd
In our stadium 4756 people is packed stadium. It is awesome, it is loud, there are ooohs and aaaahs, which is really exciting. A nice victory would have been awesome at the end of the day, but the atmosphere was awesome, it was a great crowd.
On newcomer Micaela Esquivel
One of our freshmen, Micaela Esquivel was outstanding today. She has never played fullback and we had only talked to her a couple of days ago about playing fullback and she did a great job. Then, we moved her to midfield and she did a great job there. When we recruited her we knew she was good but we didn't know that she would be able to contribute so much at the beginning of her freshman year so that was a real bright spot for us. Another bright spot for us was Bree Horvath. She tore her ACL in late April and we never guessed that she would be playing in the first game of the season and she did. She didn't play great, but you don't come off of an ACL injury four months later and play great, but the fact that she was playing was awesome. So that allows us to plan on, sometime in the next few weeks, for her to really start being a key player for us. We were thinking that she wasn't going to even start playing till the end of September and maybe being a key player in October or maybe even have to redshirt her. So I thought she looked really good physically.
