Freshman forward Rachel Yepez is in her first season with the LSU women’s soccer team and comes to Baton Rouge from Fayetteville, N.C., as one of the top 75 recruits in the country for the Class of 2006. She earned recognition as one of the nation’s premier scorers while competing with the Region III Olympic Development Program Team since 2001. Yepez will help lead the LSU offensive attack for the next four years and is sure to have a great career in Baton Rouge.
Diary Entry
I’ve been at LSU for a little over a month now and I absolutely love it. I really didn’t know what to expect from school or soccer coming in, but my teammates are amazing on and off the field and I have actually known a lot of the freshman for a few of years from ODP. They are all very supportive and a lot of fun to be around. Everyone gets along great, and I think it shows with our play on the field.
The main reason I chose to come to LSU was because of my teammates and coaches. The campus is also beautiful and we have a great academic center too. Michelle Makasini, Brittany Lowe and Kathleen Walsh are my roommates and we have a lot of fun together and get along really well. I do miss my family and friends back home, but I’m actually not as homesick as I thought I would be coming here. We have been really busy since day one, so I haven’t had much down time. When I do, it’s usually spent studying or sleeping, and that’s a good thing for me.
School has been going pretty well so far. I like my professors for the most part and it seems like I’ll have some interesting classes. I’m in psychology, English, EDCI, geography and math for my first semester here. I’m just hoping to meet a lot of new people over the next four years. I haven’t decided on a major just yet, but I hope to figure that out very soon. I want to make good grades and maintain a high GPA.
We’ve had a decent start to the season. Our opening game was rough with a 2-0 loss to SMU, but we came back and won three straight. We improved every game up until this past weekend with a couple of tough losses to some good teams. We lost to both Navy and Villanova in Annapolis, Md. Although we didn’t play as well as we probably should have, we now know how we need to play and what we need to do to win. We’ll make our adjustments and improve more and more. We’re a very young but talented team. I think that we’ll be fully prepared by the time we reach SEC play.
We’re very excited to be playing that level of competition and we have high expectations, so hopefully we’ll reach all of our goals. I want to win the SEC at some point in the next four years and do some damage in the NCAA Tournament. I know the rest of my teammates feel the same way, and I think that’s a very reachable goal.