Christina DiMartino is a former soccer player with the Massapequa Soccer Club & Massapequa HS. She played her college soccer at UCLA and is currently a member of the US National Team and the Philadelphia Independence of Women’s Professional Soccer.
Over the coming months, Christina will be reporting in to LIJSoccer.com as she goes through her WPS season and looks
ahead to the 2011 Women’s World Cup this summer. Be sure to check back regularly for updates.
Hi Again Everyone,
Well, we are just about done with the preseason portion of our training. The final roster cuts were made on Monday and our team is taking shape. We’ve been playing scrimmages against a lot of college teams, which is a big help when it comes to getting ready for the season. Tomorrow we have our final scrimmage against North Carolina, and then Sunday we have our regular season opener against Sky Blue in New Jersey.
So far I feel like I’ve been playing well, and the team has been playing very well. The first few games are what our coach calls “marriages”. This is when we find out who plays well together, which formations work best for us, and we get to try out different things without the pressure of needing a certain result (a win!). During the preseason everyone usually plays about a half of the game because we’re still practicing. This week we’ve spent a lot of time working on set plays and strategy – how we’re going to attack, how we’re going to defend. These set plays, at least the ones that seem to work well, or the ones we’re comfortable with, will be the kind of foundation of our offense once the season starts.
I’m actually looking forward to the scrimmage against North Carolina tomorrow. I’ve actually played against them twice in the Final Four when I was in college at UCLA. They are really the top college program in the sport, and playing them will be great preparation for us. One thing you know for sure when you play Carolina, they are going to compete, and they are going to challenge you as a player and as a team.
With our first game coming up after that, we’re not doing much film work yet. During the season, after we have a few games under our belt we’ll spend time studying film of our opponents to see what they do offensively and defensively. But this early in the season we spend more time on what we do. We focus on us.
We’re still working through double-day practices now, but that will end soon. On Wednesday we only had one session and then the whole team took a tour of the city of Philadelphia, which was a lot of fun. We had cheese steak sandwiches at Pat’s, a famous cheese steak stand in Philly. It was okay, but I’m more of a New York pizza girl!
TINE’S TALES
I keep trying to remember things from my LIJSL days, and one thing that I remember was a really big deal was the patches! At tournaments, we would play a game and then exchange patches with the other team. We used to wear them on our jackets, and we’d have this sort of running contest to see who had more patches. Right away, I’d ask my mom to sew the patches on my jacket. It was cool to show everyone all the teams you had played against.
I’ll talk to you guys in a couple weeks! Hopefully our team gets off to a good start to the season!
DREAM BIG!
Christina