Dan Green

As I mentioned yesterday, I was going to go into some Dan Green stories. He was the best goalie that I ever played with, even better than The General. And The General was a very good goalie, I believe he was all conference and on the Journal Sentinel All Area team. The General might have to chime in and enlighten us with his accolades.

Anyhow I played Reinders U23s with Dan Green. Kaker, Mark Thome, Krum and Justus were also on that team. I remember a game we played down in Racine. The team was pretty unorganized and we ended up playing short players that game. I think we started with 10 guys. Mark Thome got a red card which put us down to 9 guys. Then Joe Reinders had to leave at half time because we was going to Madison for something involving the UW Soccer team, so we were down to 8 guys. Eric Case got hurt in the second half and couldn't run. But because we couldn't play with 7 guys the ref said Eric had to stay on the field so he just stood by the sideline at midfield. So we were essentially playing 7 on 11...and we were winning. But being down 4 players we were just getting shelled. Green made one fantastic save after another. One play had the opponent take a shot from 20 yards out. The moment the ball wizzed past my head, I said to myself "That is a goal." I turned my head to watch the ball go in the goal. But what I saw was Dan Green 4 feet in the air, laid out with his body horizontal to the ground and he snags the ball clean out of the air. The greatest save I have ever seen with my eyes. As he rose to his feet as we were all headed up field, we all said "Nice save Green" like it was a routine save. I remember it like it was yesterday. He also stopped a shot that was going to sneak right inside one of the posts. He dove at that ball and it was moving at a pretty good pace and he stopped it with one hand that he slapped down on top of the ball. Green probably made 50 saves that day and we actually ended up winning that game, I think it was 3-1 or 3-2.

This was also the same game that Krum broke his wrist. Total Krum story. There was a light rain this day. After the game, I switched out of my cleats and I saw these young kids that were playing basketball on a court right next to the soccer field. I asked to see the ball and went up and dunked it. Don't get too impressed, the rim was only at 9 feet. Then Krum, with his cleats on gave it a shot. Not surprisingly he slipped a little bit before he jumped and he got the ball stuck on the rim. He fell backwards and caught himself with his hands and broke his wrist.

Another Dan Green story. I think it was my senior year of high school and we heard about tryouts for a soccer team in Milwaukee that Louie Bennett (a former Milwaukee Wave player) was putting together. The tryout was maybe an hour or an hour and a half long. We did a couple of drills, offense against defense and then we went into a full scrimmage. Over the course of the whole tryout, Green was in goal and took 100s of shots. He only let 3 balls get by him the entire tryout and I had 2 of them. Apparently Louie didn't think that scoring meant too much, because out of the 4 of us, I was the only one who didn't get invited to join the team.