Chapter 9: New Tricks and Opportunities

My club team had started up again by mid-summer. Eric and I were joined by Jorge, who made the team as keeper. We had practices four evenings a week, and played either one or two games on the weekends.

At about the same time, the Duane Olchick clinic began. Olchick was a Czech player who had been playing for three years in the U.S. and was scheduled to go back to Europe in the fall to play. He had a couple of months of down time before he left, so he was running clinics in several cities in the Midwest. He had two weeks scheduled here for college and high-school players, and the organizers had announced that he would stay for one more week to work with a select group of younger players.

Trent, Eric, Mike Evanson, Jorge, Kristina, John Bennington, Tessa Navarrone, Ashley Horvath, and I were joined by a whole bunch of players from other schools. I didn't know most of them, but I was surprised to see that some of the kids from the All-State team that I had met at the banquet last winter were attending, including Jesse Wilhoit and his sister Anna, Spencer Goldman from South High, and Harlan Corwin from Rock Falls.

"Jesse!" I jogged over to them as they were getting out of their car. "Anna! It's great to see you!"

"Porter!" Jesse dropped his gear bag and extended his hand. "Good to see you, man. I thought you'd probably be here."

I glanced over at his sister.

"Hi, Sean," she said shyly. She smiled at me, a smile I remembered very well.

"Hey," I said, "you got your braces off. You look great, Anna." And she did look great. In the eight or nine months since I had last seen her, she had filled out very nicely. She had been a tall, thin girl with dark hair and braces, seemingly a little awkward, even though she was a respectable soccer player. Now, she was even more attractive, having grown up a little more. She had been very self- conscious of her braces, but now, without them, she smiled much more easily, and when she smiled, her whole face lit up.

We started hauling their gear over by the fields. "I thought you'd be at school by now," I said to Jesse. Jesse had been the only All- American selection from our state in soccer, and he had a full scholarship to the University of Florida.

"I leave in three weeks," he said. "We've got conditioning workouts, skills drills, and scrimmages the first two weeks, and then formal tryouts after that. Our first game is only a week after that, so there's not that much time."

"Tryouts?" I asked. "I thought you were on the team."

"Nah," he replied. "Just because I've got a scholarship doesn't mean I'm automatically on the team. It just means that they think I'll be able to make the team, and even contribute eventually. But if I don't make the team, you know that the free ride will be yanked for the next year, so it's a true motivator. Besides," he added, "I don't think I'll have a problem making the team. Making a starting position will be a lot more difficult."

There were about seventy soccer players at the clinic. Most of the players were sitting in the bleachers, and a few kids were passing a ball around on the field. I introduced Jesse, Anna, Spencer, and Harlan to the kids I knew. Everybody knew who Jesse was, of course, so he immediately became the center of attention, until Duane Olchick and his assistants walked over and stood in front of the bleachers. One of the assistants blew a whistle, while a second one brought the kids who had been on the field over to the bleachers.

When everybody had quieted down and found seats, he began with introductions. He spoke with a slight accent that was quickly forgotten.

"Hello, everybody, and welcome. My name is Duane Olchick, and I am happy to be with you for these next two weeks. These are my assistants." As he named each one, they stepped forward and raised their hands. "Nicholas Arpente, Yuri Olchick, Anik Olchick, James Bricker, Katrina Sorenno, and Tasha Wallace. Yes, before you ask, Yuri and Anik are my brothers, very good players in Europe. James comes to us from Connecticut, where he is their starting keeper, and he will be working with all the goalkeepers here. Katrina plays for UCLA, and Tasha is a coach for the University of Arizona, after starting for that team for the past four years."

He did a quick head count, and nodded to himself. "Good. We are well represented here. Now, some of you who have attended clinics in the past might be wondering why there are both men and women players here. After all, most instructors at this level prefer to separate men and women, because of the differences in the speed of their games. My own philosophy about the game of soccer is that the same skill sets are used by all players, so there is no reason not to teach all players these skills. When it comes time to play as teams, most of the time we will conduct separate men's and women's games, though we will occasionally play combined, coed if you will, games. And, you may have noticed that I said 'men and women', not 'boys and girls'. Despite how you may think of yourselves, or how your parents or teachers or other adults think of you, here you truly are men and women, not little children. I will expect you to behave as adults, work like adults, for the next two weeks. Does this meet with the approval of everyone?"

There was no dissention from any of us.

"Ya. Good. Now, I have seen film of some of the athletes here. Please raise your hand when I call you, yes? Jesse Wilhoit." Jesse, sitting next to me, raised his hand. "Ah, yes," continued Duane, "please stand, if you will. All-American forward from Planey, going to the University of Florida in the fall. A very good player, no real weaknesses in your game, except perhaps for a tendency to hold the ball too long. We will fix that. Thank you, please sit. Harlan Corwin? All-Stater from Rock Falls. Also a forward, from the team that won the state championship last fall. Good ball handler, but your shots on goal can tend to be soft. We will work on that. Thank you. Erica Yost?" A girl I didn't know raised her hand. "All-Stater from North, likes to play sweeper, co-captain of your team, excellent at anticipating passes and blocking lanes, but your clearing kicks are sometimes errant. By the end of the clinic, you will be rocketing the ball exactly where you want it to go, Erica. Thank you. Sean Porter?" I raised my hand. "Ah, yes, a classic defenseman, playing beyond your years, but with a tendency to pass a little too quickly, whether the situation calls for it or not. We can teach selfishness, no?" He looked around at his assistants with a smile. "Yes, I think we can. Thank you."

And he continued with his performance, calling on every player who had been chosen for All-Sectional or better honors, giving each a compliment on their game and pointing out an area for improvement, impressing us all that he had actually watched so much game film before the clinic that he could make these points right from the beginning. If nothing else, the astounding feat reinforced our resolve to do our best over the next two weeks.

During the next two days, Olchick and his crew mixed us around with conditioning drills and ball-handling drills, shifting partners or groups every fifteen or twenty minutes, keeping us moving around the four fields. Sometimes we were running sprints without soccer balls, sometimes we were doing circular relay races with balls, other times we were doing three-person weaves down the length of each field, running from one field to the next to the next.

By the third day, we were all fighting through complaining muscles, but they kept at us, only giving us a couple of quick breaks for water, until lunchtime. I had thought I was in shape from all the running I had been doing, but Olchick and his assistants quickly did away with that conceit. At the end of the morning session, we all limped toward our cars, panting and sweating, anxious to get to some air-conditioned restaurant to cool down for a bit.

When we had straggled back to the fields for the afternoon session, Duane had us sit in the bleachers.

"Good news," he said with a smile. "You have survived the first two and a half days of my torture session. Now, the fun begins." He outlined his plans for the rest of the week, which included brief classroom sessions, watching game films, and playing all-out games.

By the end of Friday's session, I had played more quality soccer than I had practically all season long the previous fall. All these players were better than good, both the guys and the girls. When Olchick and his team divided us up into two men's teams, we were so evenly matched that the scrimmages got more and more intense, until all of us were playing way beyond our abilities as individuals. We played two full ninety-minute games every day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and when we weren't playing, we were either stretching, dribbling, juggling, or watching film, and sometimes we were doing two of these activities simultaneously.

The film that Duane chose each day was either a tape of one of our own games, taped by his brothers, or it was a game from the European Leagues, or a World Cup classic match-up. He had a tent set up for us to watch the film, and he put a film of plastic over the television screen so he could stop the tape and sketch a play or point out a pattern with chalk. He showed us how particular plays developed, and even threw in some bloopers for us, just to see if we were paying attention.

On Friday afternoon, he had a play that had occurred in our men's game the day before frozen on the screen.

"Do you see this?" he asked, tapping the image of Jesse Wilhoit on the television. "What happens here?"

Jesse answered. "I took a pass from Hap Stanford, there in the middle, and I tried to one-touch it back to him on a give-and-go, but Porter here," and he gave me a shove, practically pushing me over, "was all over me like white on rice, and I couldn't complete the pass."

"And why couldn't you finish the pass?" Duane persisted.

"Well, the pass came in front of me, and Porter was dogging me. It was all I could do to keep him from taking the ball away from me, so I couldn't control the ball well enough to touch it back to Stanford."

"Ah," said Duane with satisfaction. "Exactly. Now, what would have happened if you had sped up just a little, so that the pass ended up behind you?"

"I'd probably have tripped over Porter's big feet," said Jesse, eliciting a laugh from everybody. "Aside from that, I would have had to turn around to get to the ball."

"Really?" asked Duane, a look of pleased surprise on his face. "But perhaps not. I think Nicholas and Katrina can show you something new, yes?"

With that, he led us all back out onto the field. He set up Katrina as passer, Nicholas as receiver, about twenty meters apart. "Mr. Porter? If you would be so kind as to be our defender?" He gestured for me to join his coaches on the field, while the rest of the students gathered along the sidelines. "Now, Sean, defend against the pass just as you did the other day, please."