Alumni in Chicago

After the women's game on Saturday in River Forest, IL, our ladies team was invited to the home of Laura and Tony Shaver who live about five minutes (depending on traffic) from CUC. They have a cozy apartment into which we squeezed (not a fat joke) 23 players, 2 coaches, 4 soccer alums, and 3 soccer alumni husbands - two of them are actually football alums. They dont' really know what is going on, but we like them at games because they make a lot of noise. They served pizza, veggies and lots of desert. It was a great time for me to catch up with some former players and a chance for our current players to meet them.

We had five members of the starting line-up from our 2003 squad that won 13 games in attendance: Jen Adam, Hayley McGrail, Laura (Frazee) Shaver, Kim (Gavitt) Terpstra and Angie (Fenstermacher) Aulph. It is really difficult to keep up with the name changes sometimes, but I am doing better - we did decide that Angie will always be "Fenster". We also argued about who was a better player: Melissa or Laura. We had a great time of fellowship - we just wished we could have added a victory to the evening. . .

The last few days have brought a lot of contact with alumni. Some of whom have donated for the Women's soccer nationals trip. I don't want to embarrass any of them, but here are some email excerpts:

Wow, I cannot believe how many life-lessons, exciting memories, solid, godly friendships and an assemblance of decent health I can attribute to Maranatha
Soccer!

I am so excited for you guys getting to go to the tournament! That is absolutely awesome...wish I was going =) I can't afford much, but I want to do what I can to help the team since the time I was on the team made a huge impact on my life.

We wish the rest of you could come as well. We consider all of the soccer alumni out there to still be a part of our program. I hope to blog often while we are in Kissimmee - don't forget that the men also have a chance to earn a trip to nationals this week- we play NAC opponent Marian today. We earned the #2 seed in the Midwest Region and so we will play Moody at 3 pm on Friday, if we defeat Moody, we will advance to the region final on Saturday.