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Soccer pen pals get kicks on field and off
(by Steve Novak - November 26, 2008)
Soccer pen pals get kicks on field and off
By STEVE NOVAK
Irenna Taylor leads a double life, but both of those lives are filled with soccer balls.
Taylor is the assistant women's soccer coach at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She is also the coach of two teenage girls' soccer travel teams in Chagrin Falls.
Recently, Taylor came up with the idea of combining her two occupations with a little bit of help from the Internet. She decided to match some of her college players and her teenage players and let them become pen pals via e-mail messages.
The way that Taylor explains it, she sees it as a way for her younger players to have a role model, and for her older players to serve as a type of a surrogate big sister for the younger players.
Some of the pairings that Taylor made during this past season were CWRU's Annie Altenau with 13-year-old Amy Dishong. Another pairing involved CWRU's Anna Selser with Caroline Haber, who is also 13 years old.
Both Altenau and Dishong were midfielders during the 2008 season, but this wasn't the only thing that they discovered that they had to talk to each other about.
"We saw one of their games, and then they came to Case to watch one of our home games," Altenau said. "Then, on Oct. 25, we held a soccer clinic for their team. It was just a chance for all of them to hang out a little."
Dishong said it was "a cool clinic," which the older girls held for the younger team. She also said that watching the CWRU game was the first time that she'd ever attended a women's college soccer game. "It's a lot faster," she said when asked about the college game.
Anna Selser is an 18-year-old freshman at CWRU. She quickly found out that exchanging e-mails with a lifelong Cuyahoga County resident can be very beneficial for a stranger.
Selser is a native of Bettendorf, Iowa, a city of about 50,000 east of Davenport. "It gave me some help in getting around the area because I'd never been to Cleveland before," she said.
Selser also said that watching the Chagrin girls play their game gave her a lot of memories of games that she played before she started playing varsity soccer in high school at Iowa.
"It kind of takes you back to your middle school days," she said. "It makes you realize how far that you've come since middle school."
Inevitably, even the topic of schoolwork entered into the discussions between the older and the younger girls. For instance, Selser's current major area of study is biomedical engineering. Both she and Altenau stressed the point that at a highly academic-minded school such as Case Western Reservee University, there is always, always schoolwork to be done.
The message seems to have gotten through loud and clear.
"Oh yeah, they have a lot more homework," Dischong said, when asked about her older pen pals.
Haber said that she had found out that there's a lot more tests which are given in college classes. "The tests stress you out a lot in college," Haber said.
All of the players said that they are continuing to send e-mail messages back and forth, despite the fact that soccer season is over. There's always a season for e-mails, when you're not too busy doing homework.
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