The Lanther Diaries: Entry No. 1

Hello everyone! Welcome to the "Lanther Diaries". This is a blog about our 2017 UWM Women’s Soccer season!

For those of you who don’t know, every year we write a blog about everything that goes on throughout our season! This year, we decided to have all of the seniors be the authors of the Lanther Diaries. The seniors this year are (left to right): Sydney Senn, Maddie Tetzke, Anny West, Erin Corrigan, Mallory Geurts, Jen Eberhardy, Aubrey Krahn, Cassidy Blanchard, Anna Smalley and Kiley Kreple.

FYI – “lanther” is our team nickname ... meaning “lady panther”.













Anyways ... it’s been quite a busy August. We began our preseason on August 1st, a.k.a. Christmas in August, when we got all of our brand new, beautiful gear for the season. We were blessed with cool new tennis shoes, the new Messi cleats, t-shirts, backpacks, sweatpants, sweatshirts and much more. After we got our gear, preseason kicked in with two-a-days. Luckily, we had our first exhibition matches within the first couple weeks, against Loyola University of Chicago and Illinois State. We beat Loyola 2-0 with goals from Lolo and Maddie, but unfortunately lost to ISU 2-1. Our exhibition games were all about getting the new freshman some experience and getting our formation figured out!!

Last weekend were our first real games and overnight road trip!!! The 7-hour bus ride to Akron flew by (not really) but four square, many different bus games, and movies helped a little bit. When we arrived in Akron on Thursday night, we walked around on the field, and went back to the hotel to eat some delicious Olive Garden dinner (breadsticks were on point). On Friday, we had a very intense spikeball tourney (special shoutout to Anny for bringing her net on the trip. We even had some strangers ask if we were professional traveling spikeball players (and of course without hesitation we said yes).

Friday night we played a competitive 90 minutes versus Akron, but the ending score was 0-0. Neither team could find the back of the net in overtime. We had a ton of good chances, but weren’t able to finish them. On Saturday, we traveled to Robert Morris University, where our coach Troy played college soccer. We met Troy’s old college coach, now the head Women’s soccer coach at Robert Morris, who told us a lot about Troy’s good ole days back in college. We heard a lot of funny stories and even were able to ask him some of our own questions.

Later on Saturday, we drove into downtown Pittsburgh and did a little sightseeing until we got stuck in the middle of a thunderstorm. Pour little Gaby Zabala experienced the rain firsthand when she made a bet to run outside in the downfall. On Saturday night, we had our annual Dance Show, brought to you by Sara Petrone and Olivia Davies. A special rendition of “The Boys are Back” from High School Musical was definitely the highlight (mostly because Sara almost fell dancing on a table).

Our game against Robert Morris went very well as we finally scored some goals, beating them 2-0. It was a great win on Yenni Cuatro’s (Jen Eberhardy) 22nd birthday.

This week we are getting ready for another away weekend, with games against Southeast Missouri State on Friday and Eastern Illinois on Sunday. Friday’s game will be broadcast live on OVC Digital Network. Follow along for some lanther action!!

Catch the Lanther Diaries throughout this fall!

-Seniors <3