What I know about the nuances and subtleties of the world’s most popular sport would fit into a garbanzo bean.
Yet something I have learned over the years about soccer is that the ability to score is similar to the ability to hit a baseball. Either you can do it, or you can’t. Why it is that way I do not know. I just accept it.
So it is with forward Caroline Smith, the greatest soccer player in the history of Kansas University athletics. Smith does not look like a skilled soccer player. She looks like one of hundreds of other students. It makes you wonder if her classmates have any idea what a talented soccer player she is.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Smith play as a freshman during the 2002 season. Her name had been appearing regularly in game stories because she had been scoring at a regular clip, so I went to watch her in action.
My reaction: THAT’S Caroline Smith???
If you lined her up with four other players of lesser skills and asked the man on the street to pick her from among the five, he would almost certainly point to one of the other four.
Smith, who grew up in suburban Minneapolis, just doesn’t fit the prototype – primarily because she stands just 5-foot-2. In fact, she and freshman Jessica Bush are the shortest players on KU’s roster.
While hardly a wisp, Smith isn’t built like a Mack truck, either. Yet she is compact, sneakily quick, deceptively athletic and gifted with the knack of putting the ball between the posts.
Incidentally, I can’t tell you how much she weighs because Title IX doesn’t delve into that territory in college athletics. Universities list heights and weights for men’s teams, but only heights for women’s teams. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but equality is equality, isn’t it?
Anyway, back to Caroline Smith. During her senior season – which starts today with a game against Michigan – every goal she makes, every assist she earns and every shot she takes only will add to her school career records.
She is Ms. Soccer at Kansas University, and she has earned that accolade because she has not wasted her inherent skills. She plays hard, she plays hurt and she plays to win.
Last year, for example, during the best season in KU soccer history, Smith scored eight fewer goals than she did the year before, but she had seven more assists. In other words, she didn’t try to hog the ball with all those defenders hanging on her.
“They can try to double-team me,” she says, “but I know the adjustments I have to make.”
Coach Mark Francis worries not when opposing coaches assign two or three defenders to shadow her because he knows Smith will make them pay by sharing the checkered rock with her teammates.
“It doesn’t seem to have worked so far,” Francis said of the defensive overloads against Smith. “It just means somebody else is open.”
Even with as little soccer knowledge as I possess, I still enjoy watching an athlete who is superior in his or her sport. So even if you’re soccer-challenged like me, you might enjoy watching Caroline Smith and the defending Big 12 champion Jayhawks in action.
