Lacy Boyd (11) goes in for a goal during the passing drill at the beginning of practice. Photo by Ashley Pajor.

I must say that after one practice with the varsity girls’ soccer team, I understand the importance of cleats. These champions of the feet are the most indispensable tool of athletes today, but I suppose you are not here to read about my new-found admiration of sports footwear. So let me refrain from boring you further and allow you to entertain yourselves with my adventures 0n the soccer field.

Setting up a time to practice with the girls’ soccer team was a surprisingly difficult ordeal. After playing a bit of email tag for a couple of weeks, I had finally set up with coach Stephanie Carpenter that I would go to junior varsity’s final  practice of the season, which was canceled at the last minute due to reasons I confess I do not know. But I was finally able to go to practice. On the day before the girls’ first playoff game no less.

We started practice with something that has become synonymous with these practices for me: running. This time it  as just a quick jog around the soccer fields before starting some drills. I didn’t exert myself too much in anticipation of what might be waiting for me later in practice. First we played an actual game of soccer with half the field, during

Michael goes in for a pass to one of his teammates during the passing drill at girls’ soccer practice. Photo by Ashley Pajor.

which the team was supposed to practice passing and talking to each other. I played forward and am proud to say that I touched the ball a couple of times, which was quite a pleasant surprise. But this was when I had my little epiphany about cleats. Whenever I would run after the ball I had to slow way down and turn 180 degrees. If I even attempted
to stop suddenly, I would inevitably slip on the grass and the possibility for cool photos quickly diminished. My old, yet comfortable, Merrells were not created to play soccer in. I did, however, have several shots on goal, attempted to recover the ball from my opponents on multiple occasions and had a nice opportunity to see how great these girls are at their sport. They dart back and forth, kick the ball with amazing speed and agility and have aim that I couldn’t even dream of in my wildest dreams.

After that we did some kicking drills with both our left and right feet. I made it in the goal almost every time (excepting once from far back with my left foot, which doesn’t matter in my mind). Granted, the goalie stopped them all and they weren’t very well placed, but as a first-timer I was proud. I was especially glad that during one of our later drills the ball made it within the goal, not above it, as that would have resulted in wholly unnecessary sit ups, which wasn’t something I was exactly planning on doing.

The remainder of practice was mostly taken up by some 1-on-1 drills, during which we practiced offensive and defensive moves. I had a ton of fun during this part and did relatively well. I got cheers when I ran straight at my opposition, who had the ball, and kicked it straight up into her. But she got me back by whooping my butt the next several times we met up.

All in all, soccer was a very enjoyable experience. It was hard work, but it was also fun to try and the girls and Coach Carpenter were really helpful. They gave me pointers and at least tried to be friendly, even when I did something stupid like smack the ball into their leg when trying to pass to a completely different teammate. Twice. (Sorry about that.)

By the end of practice, I had decided that, though I loved the other sports I played this year, soccer takes the cake as the most fun practice.

Setting up a time to practice with the girls’ soccer team was a surprisingly difficult ordeal. After playing a bit of email tag for a couple of weeks, I had finally set up with coach Stephanie Carpenter that I would go to junior varsity’s final practice of the season, which was canceled at the last minute due to reasons I confess I do not know. But I was finally able to go to practice. On the day before the girls’ first playoff game no less.

We started practice with something that has become synonymous with these practices for me: running. This time it was just a quick jog around the soccer fields before starting some drills.

First we played an actual game of soccer with half the court, during which the team was supposed to practice passing and talking to each other. I played forward and am proud to say that I touched the ball a couple of times, which was quite a pleasant surprise. But this was when I had my little epiphany about cleats. Whenever I would run after the ball I had to slow way down and pivot 180 degrees. If I even attempted to stop suddenly, I would inevitably slip on the grass. My old, yet comfortable Merrells were not created to play soccer in. I did, however, have several shots on goal, attempted to recover the ball from my opponents on multiple occasions and had a nice opportunity to see how great these girls are at their sport. They dart back and forth, kick the ball with amazing speed and agility and have aim that I couldn’t even dream of in my wildest dreams.

After that we did some kicking drills with both our left and right feet. I made it in the goal almost every time (excepting once from far back with my left foot). Granted, the goalie stopped them all and they weren’t very well placed, but as a first-timer I was proud.

The remainder of practice was mostly taken up by some 1-on-1 drills, during which we practiced offensive and defensive moves. I had a ton of fun during this part and did relatively well. I got cheers when I ran straight at my opposition, who had the ball, and kicked it straight up into her. But she got me back by whooping my butt the next several times we met up.

By the end of practice, I had decided that, though I loved the other sports I played this year, soccer takes the cake as the most fun practice I’ve enjoyed this year.

Don’t forget to follow the Xpress next year for more On the Field and check out our final issue, which will hit newsstands on May 18.

The only changes are I will now be practicing with varsity. The day before their first 5A playoff showing. Suffice it to say that I am extremely nervous.

However, as always, I will have Ashley by my side to, if nothing else, laugh very hard at the videos she takes, which, by the way, will be available here in a few hours.

I chose Girls’ Soccer because I figured that it would make for an entertaining story. Soccer is a very exhausting sport, and while I certainly don’t look forward to all that running (ugh!), I believe that you will be entertained and hopefully, gain some insight into the mind of a soccer player.

My biggest worry: all that running. It’s insane how far a soccer player runs in one game.

I am most looking forward to trying some soccer because, while I’m not great, I at least know what I am doing, enjoy it somewhat and, as few people know, once contemplated playing soccer…until I learned how much running was involved.

Don’t forget to check back here tonight for some great photos and videos!

P.S. Thank you to Ashley Pajor (photographer) for her last-minute support!

Baseball, while yes the American pastime, I just never really got. You run you stop you run, wait no go back. Try again. Fail. Now switch positions. What? That was my basic understanding of the sport.

Well my experience with the boys’ baseball team most definitely changed my perspective of the American pastime.

I arrived at the baseball diamond after school one very nice spring afternoon to meet the team and participate in their
training. Right off the bat I was welcomed and given a glove. Since I have basically never played baseball (except in the back yard with my brother when I was about 9, and that was enough for me to figure out baseball was not my sport) I have zero skills, talent, or anything really to give me a little support in the practice.

We started the practice with a quick warm up: partners throwing a ball back and forth. So I partnered with Matt Spirek
and started throwing. My catching skills were not up to par at first and I missed the ball quite a bit but towards the end I was able to catch most of what was coming at me. Unfortunately my throwing was about the same level as my catching and I could throw a little over half the distance the rest of the team was throwing.

We next had a meeting with the whole team with coach Freelhing standing center. He gave us a quick rundown of how
practice would go down, and introduced me to the team. We then split up JV and Varsity; with Varsity starting on the field and JV in the batting cages.

I went with Varsity. Everyone threw down their gloves and started jogging over to one side of the field and pulling giant net things and a rolling giant net thing to the center and home base of the field. I stood around and looked pretty for this part of practice…

We then had another meeting, this time it wasn’t the game plan for the day but the game plan for the rest of the season. Coach Frehling was very clear in emphasizing that while the game is a physical one, it is also a mental one. They needed to clear their heads of past losses, and focus on what’s happening now.

After the meeting we divided into outfield and infield, and started batting. There were 3 stations for batting practice.
The first was “air batting” at a wiffle ball, basically you swat at it with your hand. It stings. Bad. But not too bad. After a few rounds of the swatting practice, I moved onto the next station. Hitting a wiffle ball with a baseball bat. At first it was rather disastrous however once again I was able to get the swing of it it turned out ok. The third and final stage was of course a real bat with a real baseball inside the giant rolley-net-thing which turned out to be a kind of portable batting cage.

I came up to the plate, rather nervous, after all I was about to make a fool of myself in front of the entire boys varsity
baseball team. I looked at the umpire, Dylan Dwyer, who gave me some weird facial gesture, and faced the pitching
mound. “I can’t do this I can’t do this” was all that was running through my head. And finally it came out my mouth.

“We never say cant” said coach Frehling, “you can do it”. So he came over and threw up the ball a few times right in front of me and I hit the balls. Then when I miraculously hit the ball from that position, he moved back to the pitching net-thing the boys dragged out earlier and pitched (a little slower) just like he would with any other member of the team. And I hit it! Wow, let me tell you I was extremely surprised, and am still. Me, with zero coordination, who tripped over the bucket of balls in the middle of the field later in practice, hit the tiny little baseball! Yes! And all in about a minute too. Now that’s good coaching.

We did this drill for a while, switching off infield and outfield. Outfield was less intense for me than infield, mostly because I just got all the baseballs and threw them in a bucket. And then tripped over the bucket… but in any case, I was in the outfield. When we finished this drill we did some conditioning. Which is basically the same sport to sport: Running. So we ran around the diamond and came back and stretched and then did the “relaxation exercise”. Now this was a first for me.

We were instructed to lie on our backs and look up at the clouds, the sun was setting and so it wasn’t too bright any more. “Close your eyes” coach said, “Arms at your sides”. “Now breathe, Buddha belly! Breathe into your stomach. Now keep breathing, hold it for 4 seconds, and exhale.” So we breathed for a while, it was very relaxing; I thought this might be all but then… “Now, visualize all the things that are stressing you out. School, homework, girls, (boys) and now exhale. Exhale it all away”. This was nice; exhaling all my ridiculous homework, projects, and stress, very nice indeed. He then said to “visualize all the things that make you happy, a great homerun, your best game of baseball”
etc. etc. When we had finished with our happy visualizations, he had us tense different muscles of our body, starting
with our head and ending with our toes, one section at a time. And finally, he had us visualize a cold bucket of water being poured on our head and going down the rest of our body. I must have visualized this very good because I don’t really know what he said after that due to my shivering in the grass from the cold bucket “dumped” on my body.

Practice finished with the relaxation exercise, around 6 o’clock. While everyone was relaxed, it was still easy to see the tiredness in the faces of the team. Practice was long, it was hard, and it pays off. The baseball team has done really well this year; excluding a loss from Pomona the guys have had a great run of games. The season is almost over, but you can still catch a piece of the action April 20 when the guys play Dakota Ridge at 4 pm.

Michael Auslen geared up for some pole vaulting action before track practice at Arvada West April 7. Photo by Ashley Pajor.

It’s been a long time since I last had the opportunity to participate in one of RVHS’s wonderful sporting practices and, to be honest, I wasn’t completely confident in my decision to do girls’ track. Those who recall my first column (cross country) will remember that I am not athletic, as I continually assert, but even more specifically, I do not run.

I abhor running.

Nevertheless, track went off relatively well.

At the beginning of practice we gathered near the math hall and did two laps of some combination of stairs and running through classroom wings. I must express some pride in my ability to stay near the head of the pack with my faithful partner in journalism Ashley Pajor (who is, incidentally, a member of the track team), but, near the end of the second lap I found myself near the rear of the pack.

In any case, I then went outside to throw discus and do triple jump. I started with the wimpy fake disc, and didn’t do

Michael Auslen trying discus for the first time

so hot, but I did graduate to the real deal one pound disc. Though discus wasn’t my strong point by any means, if I do say so myself, triple jump is possible the most fun thing I’ve done with any sports team during practice to date. It took some practice to figure it out, but even Ashley said I wasn’t too bad. I suppose now would be the appropriate time to do a bit of shameless promotion. I have put videos online of discus, triple jump and my pole vaulting adventures at www.rvhsnews.com.

At that point, I was supposed to do sprinting, but that group of girls was finished, so we cut the day short.

However, after spring break, I got back together with Ashley to do the one thing that, from the beginning of planning my track practice misadventures, I had vehemently opposed: pole vaulting. Somehow, I am not comfortable with the idea of holding a long pole and running straight towards a pile of mats, only to hoist myself onto said mats using said pole. It seems unnatural and, frankly, extremely dangerous. But I reluctantly agreed to accompany Ashley to Arvada West for one day of practice. Unfortunately, there were other people practicing there, so I didn’t get quite as many tries doing the real deal as I would have liked, although maybe that was for the best. For starters, Ashley taught me
how to swing forward using the pole. I was instructed to thrust one knee forward and have the trail leg follow behind, a move I quickly likened to Peter Pan. But my trip to Never Neverland was regrettably cut short by my own failure at athletics.

As Ashley added steps to my travesty of an attempt at pole vaulting, I quickly worsened in my ability to do any of it. In fact, even things I had mastered earlier seemed to disappear from my short list of things I can do which require insane amounts of hand-eye coordination.

I did finally get a couple of tries on the pole, the first of which was an utter failure (but it was all Ashley’s fault for not fixing my hand position), but the second of which sort of worked. I say sort of because I only made it onto the mats with very little air time or height, but I say worked because I actually made it onto the mats without injuring myself, which was above my own expectations. Though my time with the girls’ track team wasn’t nearly as physically strenuous as some of my other practices, it was very difficult. I spent most of my time doing field events and found that it takes a serious amount of practice and dedication to succeed. These girls (and, I suppose, their male counterparts) push themselves throughout the entire season to achieve as close as they can come to perfection. There’s always some little tweak to make to the routine or a few more inches that can be thrown or jumped. So, though
I may not have been tested as much as usual, I did come out of girls’ track with a few very beneficial things:

I now understand the difficulty of field events, which I once would have considered not altogether difficult to master.

I have conquered my fear of pole vaulting, and what a short-lived fear it was.

I have, as usual provided you with some sort of entertainment at my pitiful athletic attempts, this time in a video format online.

Don’t forget to check out videos and photos at http://www.rvhsnews.com/michaelauslen/girls-track-anticipating-doom, http://www.rvhsnews.com/michaelauslen/girls-track-still-breathing-hard-part-i-recap, http://www.rvhsnews.com/michaelauslen/girls-track-will-i-stab-my-foot-part-ii-pre-practice, http://www.rvhsnews.com/michaelauslen/girls-track-i-pole-vaulted-part-ii-recap-and-video.

I went with Ashley Pajor to Arvada West (that’s where all the pole vault stuff is set up) and we got right to work. She started off teaching me how to plant the pole and swing across it. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, for some reason I couldn’t get it down just right. Basically, you plant the rubber end of the pole onto the ground and thrust one knee forward. The other leg (or trail leg) follows behind, locked, and at a high angle, almost parallel to the ground. On the rare occasions when I got it right, I felt like Peter Pan.

Then, she thought she’d try something a little more difficult. Big mistake. I was instructed to walk forward, then plant, then do the cool Peter Pan thing. If all had gone well, I might have had more tries jumping over the bar, and then I’d be off to Neverland. As expected, though, it did not go well and a pinch of fairy dust just wasn’t going to cut it. I tried and tried and tried until, at one point, Ashley said, “I think you’re getting worse.” Well duh! I’m not athletic (as I continue to remind those readers who enjoy my suffering), and something that requires as much coordination and physical multitasking as pole vaulting just isn’t my forte.

As we neared the end of the practice, I did get a couple of tries jumping onto the mats. The first one was an utter failure. Although in my defense, it was all Ashley’s fault. She still had my hands positioned low down on the pole for swinging on the pavement, as opposed to high up near one end for using the pit and mats. On my second try I did get some air, but I probably wouldn’t have made it past the first bar height.

So, pole vaulting isn’t something I should consider pursuing. Oh well, I did learn that it’s really hard. Ashley and the A-West pole vaulters aren’t new to this sport, yet the coach had so many things to help them with that I was just amazed. It’s a very delicate art and I guess I’m just not up to it.

Videos:

Michael’s first attempt at pole vaulting with the actual mats. Video by Ashley Pajor.

Michael’s second and final attempt at pole vaulting with the mats. This time, he actually succeeded in getting off the ground (thanks for fixing my hands, Ashley). Video by Ashley Pajor.

Professional Number 1: Ashley Pajor, Xpress reporter and RVHS pole vaulter, makes one of her vaults at Arvada West during girls’ track practice April 7.

Professional Number 2: One of Arvada West’s pole vaulters at his practice on April 7.

Michael Auslen geared up for some pole vaulting action before track practice at Arvada West April 7. Photo by Ashley Pajor.

Pole vaulting is scary. No, seriously, it really freaks me out. Understandably, therefore, I am very nervous about my second day practicing with girls’ track because I’m passing into the realm of the pole vaulter.

In just 40 short minutes, I will be on my way to Arvada West to pole vault with Ashley Pajor. This should be interesting. I don’t have much to say but this one question:

Has anyone ever stabbed his foot into the ground pole vaulting.

P.S. Thank you whoever has the pole for my weight. Your contribution (by giving me a pole 35 lbs. too heavy) will really make this funnier–and possibly more dangerous.

Michael Auslen trying discus for the first time

Today I went to Girls’ Track practice (see original post for my pre-practice thoughts). It was interesting to say the least.

First, I met up with the rest of the team back in one of the hallways of the school and we did some warm up, by which I mean ran two laps, each consisting of running up and down stairs, through classroom hallways and, essentially giving ourselves a good tour of the building. I actually held my own (I am not very athletic for those who don’t know); I was second in line behind Ashley Pajor for most of the run, but I could have passed her if I knew where I was going. Then I got passed by more than half of the girls. Oh well, they do this almost every day and I do not.

Michael Auslen landing a successful triple jump at track practice. (Photo by Ashley Pajor)

Then, the girls split up into groups; we started with the throwers doing discus, which I was not horrible at. The coaches helping us there were amazing and I was nowhere near as good as them, but I did okay as far as I’m concerned.

After that, the line started to build up (they guys had come over by this time), so Ashley and I moved on. The jumping coach wasn’t there so she taught me how to triple jump. I think triple dump was the most fun I have had since we started “On the Field” last October. You jump, skip and land into a giant pit of sand. How awesome is that!

To finish off the day, we were supposed to go do hills with the sprinters (and enjoy the torture that was bound to be), but at this point they were done. So, we decided that the week after Spring Break I will do one more track day to do sprinting and to go to Arvada West High School with Ashley to pole vault.

Michael Auslen lands triple jump during his day at girls' track practice. (Photo by Ashley Pajor)

Please enjoy these pictures and videos and keep an eye out for part two in a week-and-a-half. The full (and undoubtedly humorous) story will be available on April 15 online and in print.

Video:

Below are videos of my experiences at track practice.

Editor’s note: We are still hammering out our video capabilities. Please bear with us as we fix any problems with the following videos. Thank you.

Michael Auslen throws discus at track practice.