Winning!

  After the first 3 weekends of games, we have accumulated 3 wins and are now third in the table. Potsdam is in first with 36 points, followed by Gutersloh with 33 points, and then Cloppenburg with 32 points. Potsdam has another women's team in the first league, so if they finish in first place, they will not move into the first league. The second place team would then get to move up. The top few teams are all pretty close in points so every win is vital. This upcoming weekend we will play the fifth place team, Meppen, at home. Unfortunately I will not be playing because I injured my ankle in the game on Sunday. I jumped up for a header and when I came down, my ankle rolled and all my weight fell onto it. I went out of the game for about 5 minutes while the trainer taped it and then I went back in to finish the game. The next day it was very swollen and I went to get an X-ray at the doctor's office. His diagnosis was an Aussenbandruptur-Sprunggelenk. Which is basically a partially torn ligament in my ankle, but instead of tearing completely down the middle, a tiny piece of bone was torn off. He said I should be able to play again in 4-6 weeks, but I am hoping for only 3 weeks. I am starting physical therapy 3 times a week and icing it whenever I can. Another thing I am doing is rubbing a sport gel on my ankle before I go to sleep at night. In America I had never really used creams for injuries, but here they recommend using it more so than ice. Hopefully it works and I will be back playing in time to play the top teams in the table.

This is a link to the current standings in our league:

http://www.dfb.de/index.php?id=500676

Learning the Language

           After living in Germany for over a year, many of my friends and family ask me the same question: Are you fluent in German yet? And the answer is no, not even close.

            But let me explain. I have been going to a German language course since August. The course is 12 hours a week, plus about an hour of homework every night. There are 5 people in my class; me and 4 Polish girls on my team. We used to have class every day for a couple hours, but now we have it 3 days a week for 4 hours each day.

In class, we spend a lot of time learning proper grammatical German. We also spend a lot of time learning which words are masculine, feminine and neutral, or in Deutsch: der, die and das. For example, a table is masculine, a door is feminine and a house is neutral.

            One of the most difficult things for me to grasp is the fact that there are 4 different cases in the German sentence structure: Nominativ, Genativ, Dativ and Akkusativ. I can’t even begin to explain the amount of problems these cases cause me when trying to construct even a simple sentence.

            Another difficult thing is actually trying to decipher what people are saying when they are speaking. An example of this is a phrase that our coach uses on a daily basis. She will say alles zusammen, which means all together, like when she wants us to come in and explain something to us. For the longest time we thought she was saying, All is Susanna. Now when I actually learned these words and what they meant, it made a lot more sense. It has now become a running joke on our team to say AllisSusanna when we come together.

            Now that isn’t to say that I haven’t learned a lot while being here. If I was to have a normal conversation in German, I would be able to communicate just fine. My main problem is that I don’t always put the words in the correct places. I could say a sentence in German with all the correct words, but I would use the structure of an English sentence. But compared with the amount of German I knew a year ago, which was none, I have really come a long way. It is such a gratifying experience to be able to go to the market and communicate what I need, or to see signs that I looked at every day a year ago, and actually be able to read them now.  

My 3 course books, complete with "German Phrases" Cd's that like to pop up when I hit Shuffle on Itunes.  

First Game

        After months of preparation, we finally played our first game on Sunday. We tried out a new formation; a 3-5-2. I played right defender for the full 90 minutes. We managed to pull off a 2-1 victory against Magdeburg. The game started out well and we put a lot of pressure on our opponent, but things became a little hectic when Magdeburg added a second forward late in the second half. They got a good cross in and managed to score, but we were able to pull off a second goal shortly after. All in all, it was a good win at home and a good start to our season. This upcoming Sunday we will be playing Mellendorf at their stadium.

   
 

Die Reithalle

              Our winter break ended at the beginning of January, and it was time to begin our preseason for the second half of our season. After being in sunny Florida for 2 weeks, I returned to Germany January 12^th and was greeted by freezing rain and temperatures in the teens. The first few weeks we trained in the gym and did interval running outside. The weather was not conducive for soccer training outside, so we had to come up with another solution.

            There are not many indoor training facilities near our town, so instead we are training in the next best thing; die Reithalle, meaning riding hall. It basically looks like an indoor soccer field, except that the ground is a combination of sand and dirt instead of grass. Oh and the fact that there are nearly 40 horse stables lining the outside of the field. You can literally hear the sounds of horses neighing while we are playing.  

This is the inside of the Reithalle. 

The field is to the left and on the right are the horse stables. 

This is a close up of the ground. Those are footprints in the sand/dirt ground. 

Background

On January, 15 2011, I began my 20 hour journey to Cloppenburg, Germany where I would be playing professional soccer in the Women’s II Bundesliga. I had never been to Europe, I didn’t know a soul in Germany and I didn’t know a word of German. Luckily, I had three other Americans to share this adventure with. Our mission was simple: play the second half of the season for BV Cloppenburg and don’t get relegated from the second league. This sounded easy enough, except that our new team had lost nearly every game in the first half of the season. We would have to win or tie almost every game in order to ensure our spot in the second league for the next season. We only had a few weeks to prepare for the season and a lot to learn. Throughout the next four months we managed to win enough games to stay in the second league. At the end of the season my contract was renewed and would start my first complete season in a month.

            When I returned in July 2011 to begin my second season with BV Cloppenburg, we had a new mentality. Instead of fighting to stay afloat in the second league, we were going to try to advance into the first Bundelsiga. We had many new players join the team that helped transform our losing record into a winning one at the top of the table.

And now, almost a year later, we are faced with a similar dilemma. Win nearly every game in the second half of the season, or don’t advance into the first Bundlesliga.