When senior Shelley Marsh signed with the Emporia State soccer team, one of the selling points of the program was the promise that the team would start playing games on campus.
It took awhile, but Marsh has stuck around long enough to see it come to fruition. On Sunday at 1 p.m. the Hornets will play Missouri S&T on the field north of the Student Rec in their first game ever on campus, one of four this season.
“It’s huge. This field is gorgeous,” Marsh said. “It’s really great to see it come to life.”
The opportunity could not come at a better time for the Hornets. After a winless 2007, they are off to a 2-0 start. The Hornets have nine new players this year, including five freshmen who started in the first game.
The freshmen have brought a lot of energy into the program and the older players are playing with a new attitude.
“An identity or culture was something that we were trying to establish going into this year, and the girls have done a good job of working hard,” coach Jim Schneiderhahn said. “That’s something that we haven’t seen in these parts for a little bit. I want to say that we’re developing a hard-working team that is not going to give up.”
The ESU players said they started to see a change in effort in the preseason. The next step was getting the first win. That came last Friday against Angelo State, a team that was .500 last season. The Hornets won 2-1 and they almost didn’t know what to do with themselves.
“We were goofy,” Marsh said. “We were just so excited. We were having fun with it and I don’t think we’ve had fun with soccer for awhile.”
Now the next step is learning how to except winning.
“We just need to be careful to not let our heads get too high, because we still have a long season ahead of us,” sophomore Lauren Cathey said. “We don’t want to have another seaosn like last year and I think we’re heading down the right road.”
Schneiderhahn would like to forget last season, but he has used it as a lesson to be learned for his team.
“Winning is just like losing except that it’s a little bit more exciting,” he said. “You can develop a habit for it and things seem to fall in the right place. We have to understand one of the things that we talked about all of last year is trying to keep an even keel, and not letting ourselves get too down, and that’s hard to do. I think the exact reverse has to happen this year. We’re not world champions just because we won the first two games.”
The Hornets might not be world champions, but their having a tough time coming down from their recent high, especially with Sunday’s game on campus looming all week.
The players expect a big crowd and have been spreading the word all week. They’ve made flyers, plan to advertise it with sidewalk chalk on campus and will be handing out flyers before the football game today.
“And of course facebook,” Marsh said. “It’s on facebook, so now it’s official.”
Scneiderhann has encouraged his players to spread the word this week. He now has a team that he’s proud to show off, and it will be easier for him to recruit players like Marsh now that they are on campus.
“I think one of the things when I was hired here and spoke to Kent (Weiser) that I thought to move this program in what I feel is the right direction is to have us on campus, to have us attached to the school,” he said. “I think there’s some folks that don’t know we exist. This is kind of our way of putting ourselves front and center in what I hope to be a very positive way.”
Notes
• The Hornets will be missing leading point-scorer Allison Germany, freshman goalie Jen Stillmock and freshman defender Holli Schletzbaum.
• Emporia State’s 2-0 start is the best in school history after two games. The 2005 team started 1-0-1 and went on to start 4-0-1.
• Missouri S&T is 1-1. The last time the two schools met, ESU won 1-0 on Oct. 29, 2004.