When I started this column, the only athletic experience I had was playing a soccer season in third grade. So, for this issue, I wanted to see if my limited soccer skills were still with me. I asked Jaden Nisperos (12), the goalie on the varsity team since the end of his freshman year, to show me how to save a penalty kick.

Nisperos has been playing soccer for 12 years and he said he became a goalie because he realized he didn’t like running. 

“At the beginning of my club career, it was very difficult playing a year up,” Nisperos said. “I saw a lot of shots and didn’t save many. But, there was a lot of training involved and it took around maybe four years [starting in sixth grade] for me to truly understand the role and my position, and over the years, I’ve been training and perfecting my craft.”

We went down to the field and Nisperos set up the soccer goal as he broke down the necessities of saving the ball. 

The main component, he said, is to be able to trust your gut and your instincts because you don’t know where your opponent is going to kick the ball. When you make your save, you have to be able to predict where the ball will go. Next, you need to be able to make yourself look as big as you can by moving around and jumping, to essentially make the kicker second guess themself. 

Nisperos said you need to decide what to do based on where you think the ball is going to go. If it’s low, then you have to lunge toward the ball and reach down with your knees and not your back. If it’s higher then you need to jump up and launch yourself towards where the ball is going. 

Thankfully, Nisperos went easy on me and only kicked the ball low so I didn’t need to jump for the save. For one, I didn’t trust my height or my leg strength to be able to reach anywhere. I mean, when I walked to the middle of the net, I felt engulfed in it. This wasn’t like third-grade soccer at all, and I certainly had some struggles. I tried keeping in mind everything he said before I stood in the net, but instead of being intimidating, I felt more intimidated by Nisperos kicking the ball at me. When he kicked the ball, it grazed my hands and I was not able to save it. The second time, I felt the ball in my hands, but for some reason, I was not able to keep my hold on it and it passed right by me. After that, I thought that I needed to stop being afraid of the ball or it would keep powering through my hands. Finally, I was able to keep the ball in my hands and actually save it, but keep in mind that Nisperos was mostly kicking the ball softly at me, not into the corners. 

Once I got the hang of that, Nisperos then showed me how to do a punt, which is just throwing the ball in front of you and kicking it while it is in the air. As we’ve seen in previous issues, I am not the most coordinated person in the world, so I was a little weary. However, I channeled all my training and my 8-year-old self, and I was able to kick the ball up in the air (way higher than my field goal kick attempt in football), and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. 

By the end of the lesson, I was able to successfully save the ball. While this endeavor was definitely one of my more successful ones, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to attempt to save a ball that went over my head (which is not very high to begin with).