Hopefully, this will be the first of several this year, but one of our athletes has announced she will be playing soccer in college next year.
Congrats to Dublin Jerome soccer player, Claire Hollern (and Ohio Premiere soccer team member), as she will be continuing her academic and athletic careers at John Carroll University next fall.
This is awesome for Claire as all the hard work, long travel weekends, endless hours of playing soccer will be materializing into a college experience that will start a new chapter for her.
Even though we haven’t seen Claire for about a year or so, she continues to send us referrals. We have had numerous Dublin Jerome players come train with us because of the kind words Claire has said about our training. Mackenzie Malone and Maddie Swecker are ones just to name a couple.
Not every athlete playing sports has the desire to play at the collegiate level. I think they enjoy the recruiting and wooing so to speak. Who doesn’t enjoy feeling wanted. But, it is a different atmosphere for athletes.
You only have a short window in your life where you are in peak physical condition to play sports. Yes, I still have eligibility to run track in college and could certainly walk-on, but how well could a 47 year old trackster do against 20 year olds.
When you have the chance to play college sports and if you have that desire to want to compete to see how you fair against that much better competition, my advice would be to take it.
I feel it is better to give it a shot, even if it is for one year, and if it isn’t for you become a full-time student only. At least you scratched the itch and can say you were a college athlete. That is more than what a lot of people can say.
Kudos to Claire and hope her senior year of soccer will end with a bang. Hopefully, we will be talking about a few others as the year progresses on.
