Team Goals: Elsa Nielsen

It’s unseasonably cold. Soccer drills are outside anyway. Girls dribble through cones and pass balls back and forth to each other. Coaches shout out directions to the players, they also yell to each other, mostly encouraging, some berating. Later they’ll divide into teams and play a practice game. 

Seniors are playing through their last days of high school. Whether acknowledged or not, finality is present in every moment.

People react differently to that. Captain Elsa Nielsen will continue playing soccer in college but is concentrating on the present.

“I’m not ready to be thinking about who my roommate’s gonna be or anything like that,” Elsa said. “I’m focused on living in the moment.”

For her, that means making the most of her last season with the girls she’s grown up playing with.  

She wants things to be perfect.

“I want us to be working hard,” Elsa said. “Doing well and looking good and playing the best we can.”

Discipline is coupled with appreciation of the moments that the team has together. Outside of practice the team does all of the event days that teams do, those matter to her. She talks about everyone wearing pajamas before a game as an example of  “those little things that make the team what it is.”

Her desire to do well doesn’t override her appreciation of the time that she has left doing the thing she loves with the people she’s met doing it.

“It’s more just about, how can I make these last two months that I have where I am as meaningful as possible,” she said.

There’s an ending in this season, of making memories that’ll last forever, but Elsa’s relationship with soccer isn’t over. You get the impression it never will be.  

“I’ve been playing since I could walk,” she said. “I don’t know how to function without it.”