Portage Soccer Club U10-Jansen Girls Team

U10 Girls Head Trainer: Carl Grubb

Head Coach:  Norman Jansen

Assistants:  Adolfo Escamilla and Marshon Humphries

Team Manager:  Tammy Brown

Fundraising Rep: open

Portage Tourney Reps: Laurie Postmus & Lisa Wolf

Independent Parent Rep: Anton Foreit

PSC Goalkeeper Trainer: Keith Kroll

                                                                  click on image to enlarge

always rely on your coaches for the latest news

SPRING TRAINING SESSIONS UNDERWAY. Regular practices continue Mondays from 6:00 to 7:30 (or darkness) at Ramona Park with Carl Grubb and all three U10 teams, and Wednesdays from 5:30 to 7:00 at Westfield Park with our own team. We're practicing the week of spring break for those of us staying in town. Dress warmly! To faciliate transportation across town, please take advantage of the car-pool map that was handed out at the team meeting. Click here to see complete practice schedule. Our first game is April 13 so the season starts early this year!

THE PLAYER QUESTIONAIRE still has not been returned by all of you. Please fill these out and give to Coach Jansen as soon as you can. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers to these questions! Your answers will help the coaches make the training sessions more effective and help us in other ways too.

TOURNEY FEES DUE: We're playing in the Flint Publisher's Cup and the Portage Soccer Classic. Our fearless manager has already written checks to cover the entry fees. Everyone please write a check for $53.00 made out to Tammy Brown at your earliest convenience. Tammy emailed everyone a confirmation number for the Courtyard in Flint, where each of you have a room booked both Friday and Saturday evenings. If you don't need a hotel room Friday and Saturday, or are sharing with someone else, please call Tammy ASAP and she'll tell you what to do.

PSC NEEDS YOUR HELP on Saturday April 6 to set up goals and possibly stripe fields at the new complex. If you can help, come to the Portage Community Soccer Complex at 10:00 a.m. and let's get the fields ready for the inaugural games April 20!

SPRING WMYSA SCHEDULE IS SET. The WMSYA regular season starts April 13 at 11:00 am at Michiana Echo and runs through May 18-19. Everyone has Memorial Day Weekend off and we're playing in the Flint Tourney June 1-2 and the Portage Tourney June 15-16. For the complete Spring schedule for our team, and for maps to the fields, click here. To see the schedules of all WMYSA teams at U10 or any age, click here. Note that the mysoccer.com schedule may not show all changes, so it is preferable to rely on our schedule (be sure to click refresh or update or reload to make sure it's current) and whatever you hear from your coaches.  The game time April 13 is 11:00 am! The convention for shirts in WMYSA is the home team wears light (white for us) and has to change if there's a conflict; so always bring both shirts. Away team wears dark (gold for us) but ALWAYS BRING BOTH just in case. Since most Portage players prefer the gold shirts, we will sometimes wear them at home games as long as they're different enough from the other team's away colors. Listen to what you hear from your coaches.

THANKS TO CHRIS KEENAN, MARGARET VON STEINEN, KEITH KROLL, JIM RIGDON, and CARL GRUBB for the excellent indoor training sessions the past eight weeks. We appreciate the all the good tips and the fun games you taught us!

THE FALL SEASON WAS A SUCCESS! The girls can look back on a fun first half of the U10 year, with more to come this spring. They played aggressively and with good determination throughout the WMYSA season and at the Socctoberfest tournament. We're making steady progress on improving our dribbling, passing, receiving, and shooting skills. We're also learning how to keep our team "shape" on the field to more effectively use the width of the field to our advantage. Part of this is learning to trust our teammates to be in the right place at the right time, and by working together, we're becoming a true TEAM.  We all have a lot to learn, and that's what makes it fun to keep playing and practicing. We also learned that even when we make mistakes, it's ok and we'll keep playing and doing it a little better the next time.  The coaches are very happy with the effort everyone gave and the way everyone played this fall, and we're looking forward to a fun Spring!.

CHECK OUT THE TEAM PHOTO GALLERY. Photos taken by Tammy Brown and Laurie Postmus have been posted in our new team photo gallery. Click here to see. Also see the Socctoberfest photo below on this page. If you have additional photos you'd like to include, please contact Norm Jansen or Tammy Brown and we'll get them posted.

U-10 GIRLS TRAINING WITH CARL GRUBB.  We're very fortunate to have Carl Grubb as the trainer for the U-10 and U-9 girls.  For the past few years, Carl has coached what is now the Portage Soccer Club U13 girls team, and previously, he coached the Portage Magic, where he trained players who have by now finished their high school careers, and another who was good enough to "play up" and is now a senior.  You may recognize some of the names of girls on those Magic teams: Tarpley, Grubb, Wiegand, Strangl, Stringham, Carlson, Rosenberger, Harris, and Gillam, just to mention nine of them.  One of the things Carl is teaching them is that they'll have more fun on the field when they work hard at practices and at games, and we're all finding out that this is true. Let's make sure we let Carl know we appreciate the time he spends with our daughters!

CONGRATULATIONS GIRLS!  All 11 players travelled to the Indianapolis area for the Socctoberfest Tournament in Zionsville October 13-14.  Saturday morning the girls started strong by defeating Indy Dynamo 4-3. Then in the afternoon they played Westfield Sting to a narrow 1-0 victory in a torrential second half downpour. We knew our cross-pool game Sunday morning was going to be against the team that happened to be undefeated in the other three-team pool, so no matter what happened Sunday morning, Portage was going to play the Fury Angels from Plainfield, Indiana again in the afternoon for the championship. However, due to even more rain Saturday night, the Sunday morning games were cancelled to minimize damage to the fields (we played on brand new fields at a very nice new soccer complex just north of town), so we would only play Fury once. Three minutes into the final, a sudden thunderstorm caused a short delay, after which the sun came out and the two teams battled each other scoreless for most of the first half. Then the Portage girls scored with just five minutes left in the first half. Portage scored three more times in the second half while good defense and good goalkeeping earned another shutout victory. Congratulations to the girls on a very good outing! Thanks also to Tammy Brown for arranging great accomodations for us, and thanks to the tournament organizers for giving us first class treatment throughout!

SOCCTOBERFEST U10-WHITE CHAMPIONS  Front row (from left): Sandra Thorarensen, Kallie Strazdas, Jordan Wolf, Hannah Seelman, Lauren Brown, and Caitlin St. Arnauld. Middle row: Shelby Humphries, Hanne Guthrie, Maria Escamilla, Courtney Postmus, and Erika Jansen. Back row: coaches Marshon Humphries, Norm Jansen, and Adolfo Escamilla

HOMEWORK:  Something that's fun to work on every day for five or so minutes is juggling and fast footwork variations of "happy feet". The first step in juggling is to be able to touch the ball a single time with either foot or either thigh and pop it back straight up to a height about level with your head, and then catch it and do it again.  Since most of us don't want soccer balls flying around in the house, consider buying one of those nerf balls or a small beach ball so your daughter can use her feet more around the house. My daughter likes to dribble a tennis ball around the house, and she knows that's ok as long as she doesn't juggle that inside, or kick it hard. If you have a wall in an unfinished basement where they can safely play, that's another place to make accurate side-of-the-foot passes on the ground, and pepper (volley) against the wall to improve eye-to-foot coordination. Every minute spent doing this around the house will make us better players and a better team!  Five minutes of practice every day makes us better every week!

     
for more Portage Soccer Club news, go to the Club's web site
 

  Spring 2002 Schedule (games and practices)
  Team Roster
  Team Information
  Training Attendance  last year 
  Finances last year
  Photo Gallery New!

To see more information about last year's U-10 girls team (which five current PSC U-10 players played on with coaching by Margie Stinson), click here.

Portage Lightning Team Resume
 

 Winter 2002 Second Indoor session at SoccerZone: 6-2-0 in the U10 girls select league

 Fall 2001 First Indoor session at SoccerZone: 2-6-0 in the U10 boys league

 Fall 2001 WMYSA regular season 4-3-1 and a good start for a young team

 Fall 2001 Socctoberfest Tournament 3-0-0 in the U10-White division

 Last Year's U10-Stinson team a great season and a 3-0-0 at the Portage Invitational Tourney

NOTE:  for all WMYSA results and other cool soccer news, see mysoccer.com
   

Send comments or questions to us via e-mail at nbjansen@worldnet.att.net.