The balancing act: Pine Creek soccer’s Sophie Redner
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Scoring fifty points on Varsity as a Freshman and a 4.44 GPA? Sophie Redner, a center forward at Pine Creek High School, has topped the charts both physically and mentally. When asked what the best thing about playing soccer in high school is, she responded by saying, “I think it is the opportunity to meet a lot of people you maybe wouldn’t have otherwise.”
In addition to playing on the Pine Creek women’s soccer team, she also competes on Real Colorado, a competitive club team located up in Denver. Her ultimate goal is to play college soccer for a D1 school. She plans on achieving this by continuing to train both on and off-season, attending ID camps, and continuously asking her coaches for feedback on where she can improve.
However, these great aspirations of playing any Division 1 sport come with great sacrifices. Much of her social life has instead been used traveling back and forth from Denver to Colorado Springs for games and practices, as well as having to study for tests and complete homework assignments for school. Another difficulty that playing up in Denver has caused is that prior to Pine Creek soccer, all of her school soccer friends played for a club team in Colorado Springs. Due to this, she was unable to talk to them about recent games or joke around about something that happened in the previous practice.
Fortunately, playing for Pine Creek has changed this around, as she says, “That’s why I’m so grateful to have this opportunity to play High school soccer and be on a team with people I see in school every day.” This great expenditure of time dedicated to playing soccer has paid off for Redner, as she says, “I am driven to do the practice because I love it. I have been doing this so long that it is part of who I am.”
For Redner, the thing she is most scared about is disappointing her team and letting them down. “Having so many seniors leaving, I just want to do what I can to contribute to the success of the team and to hopefully help us win state”
As of this writing, the Pine Creek women’s soccer team is the third seed in the playoffs. “This season we have an amazing team. We have a lot of seniors and very talented players that are incredible on the pitch, and I have learned a lot from them. Having the opportunity to be on such a stacked team as a freshman has been a lot of work but better than I could have ever imagined.”
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