By P.K. Bartley
With a limited number of returning players from last season, the University of Louisville women’s soccer team has a lot of new faces this year. One of the players who is looking to bring their play to the collegiate level is freshman Gina Lower, a defender from Hamilton, Ohio.
Her accomplishments as an athlete cannot be denied. In high school, Lower lettered all four years in soccer, and helped her team to win the state championship in 1999. Among her other accomplishments, Lower’s club team won three state titles.
Lower does feel that there are differences between playing soccer in high school and college. “High school is less intense,” Lower said. “In high school, you would get really weak teams. You could get a couple of strong players on some teams and the rest of the teams wouldn’t be very good. Here, pretty much everyone is good and quick and all the opponents are good.”
Lower has set goals for herself and her team. Her greatest objective is to play consistently in every game. She also wants to become a leader for the young team, because when the seniors graduate, she would like to take over their role. Lower says the main goal for the team this year is to grow because they are so young. The team has a set number of conference games that they want to win.
They also want to stay together as a team and not to fall apart after a bad loss. In doing that, they want to build a foundation to become a conference and national power in women’s college soccer.With women’s soccer being as popular and successful as it is, Lower sees herself as a role model for young women. Last year she was a coach for a girl’s under-12 soccer team. She felt that the younger girls wanted to be like the older female players because they are doing what the little girls want to do someday. Also she noticed that a lot of young ladies came to a lot of her games and they often asked for the player’s autographs. When asked which female soccer players she looked up to, Lower said that she did not have one particular player that she wanted to be like from watching the US national team. The person she looked up to the most was her brother who was a really good soccer player.Lower feels that she could become a very good soccer player by the time she is a senior and believes that the best way for her to improve is for the team as a whole to improve. If the team gets better players, then they will start to move up in the conference to become a better team all around.
“Hopefully in the future,” Lower said, “I can be one of the leaders or the leader of my team and be a good example . . . by my attitude and work ethics, and how I play in practice and in games.” To do this she feels she must be consistent. In order to become a better player, Lower feels that she must not let the distractions that happen off the field keep her from doing what she has to do during the games.
“I always need to have a good attitude about going out there. There are games where I feel really ready for, and then there are other games where I get really nervous about.” Lower realizes that she can’t get down when things are going bad for the team. Such as right after the opponent scores a goal, she needs to just pick up the team and not let the opponent score again. By doing these things, she feels that she can become a better player and in turn the team as a whole will become better.
