Life Itself is the Most Wonderful Fairytale
It is a hot and sunny Friday in April and Iowa City is full of life; birds are chirping, the trees are becoming greener with each passing minute, the flowers are beginning to sprout and Jackie Kaeding is standing 60 feet from me holding a red plastic baseball bat.
She is fully clad in black Iowa women’s soccer workout shorts, a yellow Iowa t-shirt and Nike sneakers. She is preparing for my upcoming pitch with the stare of someone who is being cheered by 60,000 fans in game 7 of the World Series. She sets her feet methodically, pushing dirt back-and-forth beneath her and tapping the bat to the ground three times. She is ready.
I grip the ball between my right fingers, it is a three-two count and I feel the tension in my lower back. I take a peek at the imaginary base-runners and get the sign from the imaginary catcher. He wants the cheese, the heat, to blow it right by her. I wind up, kicking my leg high into the air as if I were Fernando Valenzuela and let the plastic ball rip through the air towards the acting home plate, a set of sticks. The ball seems to hold in the air while Jackie kicks her left leg towards centerfield and makes contact. The ball is crushed, dead center, a home run. She makes her way around the imaginary base path with a smile, tapping home plate with her fingers and points to the sky and blows a kiss.
This is how my time with Jackie Kaeding ended: A dead center home run and a point to the sunny April sky.
Monday, April 13: “A whole practice of straight competition.”
After a 7:00 a.m. wakeup call from Iowa women’s soccer head coach Ron Rainey, Jackie is ready for the day. She throws on her workout clothes and heads to Carver-Hawkeye Arena for indoor practice and morning workouts, usually lasting up to three hours. Early morning workouts have become meditation for Jackie, who is a senior defender for the UI women’s soccer team. “Jackie is a great athlete and leader for our team,” head coach Ron Rainey says. “She refuses to let people outwork her.” Today Jackie is training Olympic lifts (squat and hang cleans) and is also rehabbing her left-knee which is home to four scars from two different ACL and MCL surgeries. You can see the drive in her eyes as she trains. “I feel like I am really passionate about what I do,” she says with a smile reaching her ears. “At the end of the day it is not going to matter if I was a good player or student, but what’s going to matter is how I got there and the love I had for it all.”
Today’s practice was all five-versus-five and Jackie is sprinting from side-to-side, aggressively pursuing the ball in every direction. Jackie and teammate Amanda Heimann run a give-and-go and Heimann scores with authority into the upper-left-ninety of the goal. Jackie runs to her and lets out a loud “HELL YEAAAH!” Jackie thrives on competition. She relishes any chance for it and does not enjoy being on the losing end of things. “I am super-competitive, which can sometimes be obnoxious at BBQ’s and intramural games,” she says. “I would rather care too much than too little.”
Tuesday, April 14: “I have a little time to chat with my 7 roommates and I’m in bed watching Real Housewives of New York City-all of those shallow people make me feel better about myself.”
No practice today. Coach Rainey gave the team a day off due to NCAA regulations. “If there were no guidelines, coach would have us practicing eight days a week,” Jackie says with a chuckle. With her day off Jackie will be concentrating on catching up with school, family and friends. Her Cousin is in town from Philadelphia and her family heads to a local restaurant for dinner; her two older brothers, Nate, 27, and Nick, 29, along with her mother, Terry and her father, Larry. Jackie talks about her family with a sense of pride and gratification; she is grateful of her blessings and does not let this go unnoticed. “My parents never missed a game,” she says with emotion setting in her eyes. “They make me feel like I am the most important person in the world.” Her mother is equally proud of her children’s accomplishments. “We never missed games because we loved every minute of it, watching them grow into what they are now,” she says.
Jackie lives in a large white house on the corner of Dodge Street and Iowa Avenue with seven other roommates, none of which are soccer players. She says she rarely gets time to sit down and relax with them, laugh and catch up. “I love soccer because of the girls who I spend all my time with,” she says. “But I miss out with hanging with my roomies because I am playing soccer, working and finishing my journalism degree,” she says as though those priorities are in that exact order. Her roommate Jacqui Zuniga says that Jackie brings an interesting dynamic to their house because of her soccer background, obviously pointing to her comical aura off of the soccer field. “My roommates say that I am ‘too relaxed and too laid back’ and that I should work on that,” she says.
Wednesday, April 15: “I ate at least three ice-cream cones after we won that game.”
After a bowl of Chex-Mix, Jackie is out of the door by 8 a.m., ready for her weekly rehab on her hip and quad in which the trainer rubs her down with a foot-long stick. “Now that I am a 5th year senior I am always soar,” she says. “Recent injections into my hip make me feel like I am an 80-year-old.” Coach Ron Rainey is quick to point out that Jackie has been injury prone over her career and this has still yet to deter her training programs. These injuries have not kept Jackie from the big time spotlight or big time games.
As a local athlete at West High, Jackie played varsity soccer and basketball for four years and led the Trojans to an underdog state soccer championship in 2004. “I was extremely nervous before that game,” she says. “The in-game was amazing; it was like an out-of-body experience or something. It was also bittersweet because my role model and grandpa ‘Cooney’ died when I was 13. He would have loved to see that game.”
Like many people Jackie has had her ups-and-downs in life. When she was three her Grandpa Kaeding died in a car accident. “I don’t remember anything about him and that bothers me,” she says. “If I got to eat dinner with one person in the world it would be him. I’d really like to get to know him.” Her Grandpa Frank (‘Cooney’) died of cancer when she was 13. “It’s always tough losing people close to you, who love you, but you have to look at the positives in life and move forward,” she says. These tragedies haven’t stopped the Coralville native from moving forward and meeting her goals of graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Iowa. “In ten years I would love to be working for CNN, married, with a kid or two,” she says with a laugh.
Thursday, April 16: “It was supposed to be chill, but I'm a little too competitive and the game turned into a smack-talking fest.”
After yet another 7 a.m. wakeup call from coach Ron Rainey, Jackie is out of the door by 7:30 a.m., ready for a ‘light practice’. The team stretched together and headed towards the UI tennis courts for a game of ‘Soccer Tennis’. This drill is meant to break up the tediousness of practice and allow for a fun activity. However, Jackie and teammate Amanda Martin got into shoving matches on several occasions, forcing the game into limbo. After practice, Jackie took to the books until 4:30 p.m. until she was into work at Short’s Burger’s and Shine.
An athlete who carries a job, or two in Jackie’s case, is almost unheard of at a Big Ten school, especially the University of Iowa. According to the Sports Information Office, it is estimated that only 5% of student-athletes carry a job outside of their respective sport at the UI. “Having a job teaches humility and the value of a dollar,” she says. After her shift ends at 10:30 p.m. a cold beer washes her day away.
Friday, April 17: The Final Pitch.
Jackie flipped the red plastic baseball bat into the air as she connected, giving out a scream that would have been heard for miles. She doesn’t mean this out of disrespect to the opposing pitcher; in this case, it was me. She is just shaking it up, having a little fun and letting her competitive juices run wild.
Jackie Kaeding is competitive, dedicated and is talking a little smack to make it interesting. She smiles at me with her blonde hair tied back into a ponytail and says, “What other girl do you know that could hit that heater of yours?”
I simply answer, “You.” And this was my week with Jackie Kaeding.
