Throughout the 2007 Minnesota Soccer season, gophersports.com will regularly post web "diary" entry from various Golden Gopher players. Today, junior midfielder Kaitlin Wagner weighs in for the first time, taking you through the Gophers' training schedule leading up to this weekend's Dartmouth Tournament.

We are on the road again this weekend traveling to New Hampshire to play Dartmouth and Providence. These are two teams that will be great battles for us. It’s really exciting to be able to play such good soccer teams prior to the Big Ten season. It is a good way to prepare us for what lies ahead.

We have gotten into our regular training schedule for the rest of the season. Since we play games on Fridays and Sundays, we get Mondays to rest. Last Monday, Labor Day, a lot of us were moving into our new housing and getting ready for the first day of school. Tuesday was the first day of classes which, in my opinion, is really fun! Now that school has started we train Tuesday through Thursday at 3:30pm.

Tuesdays are what we call the competitive day. This is our hardest day of training during the week and usually consists of 1v1, 2v2 or 8v8 games and we play for fitness. Playing for fitness gives a little more motivation to the team to work as hard as they can during the games because if you don’t win you run.

Wednesdays are a little bit lighter than Tuesdays so we can taper for the upcoming weekend. The focus is tactical work, which is learning and becoming comfortable with the formation we play on the field. We also watch film of the previous weekend so we can highlight what we did well and what we can improve on for the next weekend.

On Thursday the team breaks into attackers and defenders. This is the preparatory day. Defenders work on 1v1 defending and their defensive shape, meaning where they should be in relation to the ball and each other in different circumstances in the game. The attackers work on shooting and crosses.
We leave today to head to New Hampshire and are really looking forward to the competition that is to come.

Thanks Kaitlin! Be sure to stop by next week for more web diary entries and the latest news about Minnesota Soccer!