Upon Further Review

Sorry, call me old school. Call me not too hip with short-form writing. Call me a slack-jawed sports columnist.

Heck, call me someone not desperate enough to coin everybody “awesome” to get them to like me. Excuse me, I throw my laurels just as carefully as my darts.

So, when I want to coin someone a “freshman phenom” or a “fabulous freshman,“ I don’t make the judgement myself. I would prefer to hear it from someone who deals with the player on a daily basis.

Which is why I threw out all the local and non-local daily newspapers I read and all the hyperbole-using reporters, who are supposed to be harmless observers and not nickname coiners, and went right to the Hornet Hive, so to speak.

And Wilson Memorial coach Scott Crist makes no bones about it, so I can go ahead and put it in quotes and make sure that you know the coach believes it, the players believe it and it’s not just some subscription-hungry guy trying to make you believe it.

So, coach, if I were to call Lindsay Suyes a freshman phenom, would I be far off?

“Not that far at all,“ he says. “She’s a rare kid.“

There you go. So she’s “not that far at all” from being a freshman phenom.

She’s also just a soccer-loving kid, with a great laugh and an even better smile that dribbles around a soccer ball more than Linus drags around that blanket of his. She’s a girl, who just turned 15, that takes that soccer ball every where—to get ice cream, to Walmart. Heck, she says the only time she doesn’t have that soccer ball with her is when she’s sleeping. As soon as she’s up, Suyes says, she’s got that soccer ball on her feet. At the practice field Monday, she had a smile on her face the whole time she was kicking it around.

Oh, and she scored 33 goals in her freshman season.

So, if you want to call her anything, let’s just call her one of those rare kids, “with a knack for the goal,“ as Crist says. And “relentless,“ you know, like her coach says.

Can we lock this thread now? (And start putting column mugs on game stories and previews if that’s how it’s going to be?)

But, wait, there’s more: “She’s a freshman who doesn’t play like a freshman,“ Crist says. “She’s like no kid I’ve ever coached before.“

Go on, coach. (No, not you, I said coach.)

“On top of having all those skills she has—what do you call them?—intangibles,“ Crist says.

So hey, coach, how about your defense?

“Those girls in the back? They’re the rock, the glue of the team,“ Crist says.

They also have some wicked-sharp senses of humor and wits about them for only being sophomores. (Should I call them “super sophs” now? Or “super-duper sophs”? Please, stop me when you’ve had enough.)

Case and point? After listening to goalkeeper Brittany Reid call her defense, and I’m paraphrasing here (total disclosure) the greatest thing since sliced bread, defender Tori Amato had this to say: “If we’re the sliced bread,“ Amato said, “then she’s the main cheese.“

Her original statement was “peanut butter,“ then she quickly changed it to “cheese” then said, “no, the main cheese.“ (We tell you this because we report what we see and hear, and not what we want to, you know, like a “reporter.“)

So then I asked Reid, how easy those four defenders—Amato, Ashleigh Harris, Danielle Adams and Chloe Cawiezell—make her job?

“Actually, very, very, very easy,“ she said. “I depend on them a lot.“

OK, so now can I call them the “Dependable Defenders”? Hey, just asking.

Then, finally, I asked Suyes herself if she thought she was a freshman phenom. After explaining that “phenom” was short for “phenomenal” she had this to say.

“I don’t think of myself as a phenomenon,“ she said. “I think everybody on the team is as good as I am.“

So there, straight from the Hornet’s mouths, and not some slacked-jaw.