At times throughout this spring season, Cornerkicks will bring you blogs you won't find anywhere else. You will hear from high school students playing high school, and you'll hear from high school students playing club.
This is the second blog from Waubonsie Valley's Bri Rodriguez, who is playing for the Warriors this spring. The junior is considered by many to be one of the top players in the country. She also plays for Eclipse Select in the high school offseason and will attend West Virginia in the fall of 2009
This week, Rodriguez talks about Waubonsie Valley's first game against Wheaton North - an early battle of preseason No. 1 vs. No. 2 - and the challenges of selecting a college program to play for.
And with that said, here's Bri:
"First of all, I wanted to say thank you to everyone for the positive comments from last week’s blog. This week was the first week we got achance to practice outside, which made me very happy because you can get a much better idea of how things are going to be during a real game.
"Lucky for us, it was actually pretty nice outside. I can only wish that will be the case when we have our first three games later this week. On Monday, we practiced after school and then went out to eat as a team. After that we got a chance to go watch the Women’s Mexican National Team play against the University of Illinois. It was a very good experience for us as a team, because we got to see two teams with very different styles play each other.
"The college search for me was very overwhelming. In my opinion, thewhole process starts way too early. Coming into my junior year, I was more worried about it being my toughest year in high school - let alone worrying about where I wanted to go to college. With being gone so many weekends for club, it was hard to visit all of the colleges I would have liked to. Being in high school you still want to go to dances,football games and see your friends on weekends. I had to miss out on a lot of these activities, so I could go visit schools. Lucky for me, I fell in love with West Virginia and am very happy with my decision to play there.
"I liked all of the soccer aspects, including the coach, the team, their style of play and their facilities. But I also loved the campus and area around it. I know that I am going to have the time of my life there.
"To answer some of the questions people had last week, I will start by saying that I didn’t feel much pressure about making my decision toplay club or high school. My club coaches were both great about it and told me that I should do whatever would make me happy. The hardest part was that I felt whatever decision I made, I would be letting someone down and I didn’t want to feel like that. When it came down to it, I knew that if I didn’t play high school I would very much regret it and I also knew that my club team would support me in my decision.I’ve played high school the last two years and neither my coaches nor teammates have treated me any differently. It’s always as if I was never even gone, which is one of the things that I love about Eclipse.
"When it comes to team chemistry with my club team, we are extremely close. Even this year after merging two teams together, we all got along very quickly and never had any problems. I don’t think taking time away from club will hurt our team chemistry at all. I still talk to many of the girls playing club and text them while they’re at tournaments to see how they’re doing. From my club team there are three of us who decided to play high school this year.
"We have our first three games this week including Wheaton North on Monday,Naperville Central on Wednesday, and Oswego on Saturday. We ar eextremely excited to play. Hopefully it won’t be too cold! Talk to you next week.-Bri"
- Joe Trost
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