Here, There and Everywhere.
I will track back to get the ball, open myself up and attract the pass. Then I will attack!Lauren is a truly talented footballer.
Of course it helps that she has plenty of natural attributes and physical talents but she works hard to perfect her skills. Every day after school she takes her cones and works basic ball handling drills for an hour. She does this in addition to her regular 5 practices/week with her team. This is what really separates her apart.
“I just love the game and I love to practice. When I’m dribbling the ball in and around cones I like to think of the cones as imaginary players and I try to visualize moves that I would use in game situations. It’s fun”.
Lolo started playing soccer at age 3. As her passion for the sport grew, she joined a Soccer Academy looking to fine tune and build a strong foundation, skill and style. When she joined the Academy, she played two years up and was forced to play to the level of her older teammates, despite also being November born. “If you throw me into an environment like that, automatically I expect to be at the same level as those guys,” she says. “If I don’t think I’ve played a good game, no person in the world is going to convince me I have.”
In the final minutes of the U10 Divisional Championship game, while in a full run, Lolo crossed the ball from deep in the corner with her left leg, directly onto the foot of her teammate, who tapped it in for a 1-0 Divisional Championship win.
- U9 – League Cup Champions
- U10 – League Cup Champions/Central Division Champions
- U12 – League Cup Champions
- U13 – League Cup Champions
- U14 – selected to Regional Excellence Program
- U15 – Provincial Excellence Program
There’s no arguing that at 14 as an athlete and soccer player, she’s operating at another level. “She has very good technical skills for a player of her age,” said her coach. “She has good vision and good awareness of the space and the players around her. She has an instinctive eye for goal scoring. She plays with a maturity beyond her years.”
At one stage we thought she’d be a great full back. Now she’s arguably one of the strongest wingers in the OPDL league in Ontario. She has shown that she can fulfill a number of roles.
Chris Vickers
Lauren’s U16 coach
Marc Maunder
Lauren’s U13/U14/U15 coach
No one attacks as often as Lolo does, and no one has more success doing so.
Left Full Back
Despite playing 2015 as a left full back, she was a leading scorer on her team and produced the majority of assists by a long shot.
Lolo is far more likely to advance the ball toward the goal, and far more likely to succeed. She loves to “pull in defenders” to set-up a give and go and make a run that she uses to cross or pass the ball forward aggressively and accurately. The balls she delivers are “successful” a very high percentage of the time.
These passes are where most of her assists come from, and indeed, Lolo has the most assists per game from these kinds of passes.
Not many attackers breach her defensive line. After dealing with Lolo’s successful tackles, interceptions and blocked shots, most coaches adjust play to the other side of the field.
Right Wing
Lauren loves her left foot.
“I prefer to go to my left side which is my dominant leg, I also like to face the goal but when it’s not possible, I’ll go towards the right and cross the ball”.
Getting the ball from the right side of the field, she will hold it for a moment, then break left to the middle and in heavy traffic she will often swerve the ball in off her left foot with some serious heat. All without an assist.
To make these unassisted shots possible, Lolo has to take on a lot of defenders one on one. She loses sometimes, and then makes up for it (and then some) by having better assisting and shooting opportunities as a result.
Left Wing
Lauren cutting in off the left, taking a defending full back head-on (feinting left or right or both) and shooting with her right has become fairly routine. Shooting from outside the penalty area, she scores roughly 20% of time.
She likes to say “having been a full back, I know what that defender is thinking and is going to do – so I wait for them to commit and then I make my move”.
Lolo can shoot it just about any which way. And she makes more passes trying to advance the ball toward the goal, with a lot of those passes finding their targets (passes that lead to “successful” plays on the other end) — meaning the receiving player manages to get off a shot, or passes the ball to someone else, and so on.