Indiana University Athletics
Hoosier Life: Jordan Chirico (08-20-02)
8/20/2002 12:00:00 AM | Men's Soccer
Aug. 20, 2002
Meet Jordan Chirico, an Indiana University freshman soccer player. Chirco, a native of Conesus, N.Y., was a National Soccer Coaches' Association All-American in 2002. He also competed in the NSCAA's High School All-America game in Charleston, S.C., this past June and was named the New York Gatorade State Player of the Year as a senior. Chirico has just finished up his first week in Bloomington and his first week as a member of the IU soccer team. Jordan agreed to outline what a typical day of preseason camp is like for a new freshman. The first installment of men's soccer "Hoosier Life":
A Typical Day of Preseason"We wake up about at about 7:15 in the morning. We cramp in two cars for 11 people, Noah (Gold) and Matt (Burke) are the drivers. We go to breakfast by 7:30 and after that we go over to the training room. We are always the first ones there since we don't have cars and can't get back to the dorms. We just hang around for awhile. Brian Plotkin and I usually play a couple of games of ping pong. He usually beats me, but that's okay. Then, we head over to practice at Karst Park, which is about 10 minutes away.
"So far, practice has been awesome, good experience. They're actually really tough. The competition is really hard. In the morning we always play a small set of games, 7-on-7 or 4-on-4. After our first practice, we always head right back to the training room and get into the ice bath, which is new for me. I've never done that before. It just relaxes your muscles and gets you ready for the next practice (at 4 p.m.). We go to lunch from about 12-12:30 and then we've had academic meetings and other things that have taken up some time in the afternoons.
"Then, we get to come back (to our dorms) and get the rest that we definitely need. We're really sore. We wake up in the morning and we never feel like we've gotten enough sleep! I guess that's part of double sessions. We go to the second practice of the day. So far, every night of double sessions, practice has been an 11-on-11 game. That's always very, very competitive. I can tell doing this every night is going to make everyone so much better. It's just competing for spots and trying to get playing time. "At night, we all just come back to the dorms. All of the freshmen live on the same floor in one of the dorms. We've been hanging out with each other. It's been cool to meet all of the new people and I think we're going to get along really well. I'm rooming with Nick (Kuklenski). So far, we've become really good friends and I think it's going to be a tight-knit group. It's really going to be a good experience for us when get older. I think we'll play for each other, which is really how the whole team is going right now. A few times at night, the older guys have come to pick us up and taken us over to their houses. We've played cards and hung out. We've also gotten some movies and just relaxed. Every night we're way too beat to do anything. Double sessions are taking everything out of us. We're in bed every night by 10 or 10:30 p.m. But I know it will just make us stronger players in the end."
On his first week at Indiana:
"It's been an unbelievable experience. I didn't really know what to expect. I knew there would be tons of good players. We have the No. 1 ranking and that puts a lot of pressure on us, but everyone on the team loves that. We feed off of that. The first week has been great. All of the guys on the team are really cool. The upperclassmen have all been really welcoming. It doesn't seem like it bothers them to have us around. They just made us part of the team right away, which is very cool."
On the practices and the level of play:
"Practices are very, very competitive. They're very intense. There's lots of hard tackling going on. People are fighting for spots and I think that will make the team better. The level of play is very high here, which is a great thing. It will help every single person improve. It's intense, it's physical, it's a fast-paced game."
On how Bloomington compares to his hometown:
"Bloomington is way different than where I'm from (Conesus, N.Y.). I live down on the lake. I'm not in the city at all, not in a college town. Bloomington is a big change from my home in New York. I didn't have too many neighbors out there, but here we've been just walking around the dorms and meeting a lot of people. With 40,000 kids (on campus at IU), it's going to be a lot different than the small town I live in. I went to a school with about 700 kids."
On being a freshman in a soccer program like Indiana:
"Being a freshman here feels very good. I know it's one of the nation's elite soccer programs and I'm just happy to part of it all. Hopefully, I can do anything to help the team go far this year and we'll see what happens.Our freshman class has just been getting out there and playing and enjoying ourselves. We've been having fun and like I said, we're already a tight-knit group."
