Razorback Soccer is Here!
From the Desk of Gordon Henderson;
For all of you wondering when these e-mails were going to start – well here we go!
For those of you that are new to the "From the Desk of" series; this has been a very successful tool to inform our local soccer community about home games, insight about upcoming games and players, free clinics with our student athletes, autograph sessions, soccer camps – in fact anything Razorback Soccer. As a program, we believe in being very heavily involved in our local community. Our players take their ‘role model’ title very seriously. They are involved with everything from clinics with local soccer clubs and teams, reading programs in our elementary schools, Special Olympics and working with at risk youth to name but a few. As a team, our program has won a team NSCAA Team Academic Excellence award for 8 straight years; in fact last year, our team GPA was the 8th highest in the nation for Division One schools – a whopping 3.50 GPA!
As a community, we should all be very proud of these young women.
Things are off to a good start in our 2008 season…..
We played our first game of the season away at Missouri State last Friday and came away with a thoroughly deserving 1 – 0 win. I was heartened by our speed of play and thought we did a great job of taking the game to our opponents. For the fourth straight year, the game winning goal was scored by a freshman; Nikki Crocco. In fact, you will see a lot of new faces on the field this year; the return of Kelly O’Connor, Sarah Gwisdala and Beth McVean from their season ending injuries from last year. Incoming freshmen Nikki Crocco and Kailey Anders have been doing very well in training and will compete immediately for playing time. In addition, we have seen the emergence of Sophie Wentz and Ohio State transfer Lauren Hallauer into starting roles. You can’t miss Lauren – 5′ 11", central defender, red hair and flies like the wind!
This Friday (August 29th – Univ. of Tulsa – 7pm) and Sunday (August 31st – Oral Roberts Univ. – 1pm) will be our opening home weekend – it would be great to see you all there in the stands cheering on our new squad for this year. This team has terrific potential to do well this year – fingers crossed for an injury free season – especially after last year! Here is the link to our schedule if you need it. Of course, at the end of the game, our team will be available for autographs. Posters and schedule cards will be available with details of the rest of the season at the game also.
2008 Soccer Schedule
My soccer operations manager will be in touch in the next few week for ball boy and ball girl opportunities at our home games for those who attended our summer camp this past year and/or who play on some our our local area teams.In addition, we will have some fantastic promotions at all of our home games. This weekend will feature a giveaway of 400 Arkansas Razorback mouse pads. In addition, we have opportunity for someone 18 years and younger to win $250.00 in our halftime feature – "Shoot for Dough" (kindly sponsored by Grandpa’s Oven). Furthermore, we will have our usual Kid’s Zone, Trivia and Bingo games. If anyone has any questions regarding the promotions or would like to get their company involved, please contact;
Tonya Edmonds;
tedmonds@uark.edu
Let’s get a great crowd out there to start off our 2008 season with a bang!
Go Hogs!
