Thorns Off Season Check-in: Angie Kerr-Woznuk Part 1

It has been a month and a half since the end of the National Women's Soccer League season. There hasn't been much news on the Portland Thorns front in the weeks since, so we jumped at the chance to catch up with midfielder Angie Kerr-Woznuk.

A quick refresher: Kerr played in 15 of the Thorns 22 matches in their inaugural season before starting both of the team's playoff matches. Before playing with the Thorns, Kerr played for the University of Portland then later with several professional teams.

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What have you been up to this year now that you don't have training every day?

Right when playoffs were happening, I actually coach a high school boys soccer team and that was actually getting started right during playoffs; we had tryouts and I was picking my team. So, I kind of when straight into that after the season and we are just finishing up. We had this last week and and a little bit of next week left. I've been lucky to coach a boys team, which has been a ton of fun and a totally different experience, because typically in the past I have coached girls. It has been a fun experience this year to work with the boys. I also do a speed, agility, and strength class for soccer players and I did that part-time throughout the season and then I picked that up a little bit more in the off season.

With the way that the NWSL salary cap is structured it seems like everyone has something like that going on. How do you balance something like that with playing for the team?

It was harder than I expected it to be, because with those salaries it does put you in a position where you need to work outside of it. My husband is a full-time student so for me personally it was even more important and it was a little tough because, even thought the salaries are low, the commitment level is still just as high as it was in the WPSL, so they expect you to be at all the training sessions and we had a lot of things going on outside of training like strength and video and community work that we had to do. It was tough, you know, balancing it all.

Thankfully, all my parents that I work with are super flexible, so there were a lot of times that I had to reschedule classes that I had or move things at the last minute. That made it challenging, but overall I was able to work both of them in, so that was great.

Coming out of the season and going right into coaching it still must have felt like you had a bunch of free time suddenly.

I definitely had more free time than I did before. When we were going into the playoffs we were having to travel on the road to all of our games. We had to go to Kansas City and then Western New York, so we were gone all the time for those games and coming home and just having the high school team to focus on, it did still feel like a break, even though I jumped right into another thing it is nice to have my mornings free and just have that kind of relaxed feeling that everything was done and we won so it was exciting.

You tweeted recently about training at Jeld-Wen Field (here), how much time do you spend on that during the off season?

This season has been awesome because we do have access to Jeld-Wen and a lot of teammates have stayed around in the Portland area, so that has been awesome because we have been able to get out to the stadium about two or three times per week.

It is a small group of us that go out and do technical work and just work on things that we individually want to improve on. That's been awesome because in the past typically everybody leaves and goes home and doesn't stick around in the city, so usually you are just training on your own and you are just having to do a lot of individual stuff, but it has been great so far because there are some girls still here that we can train with and I think more are coming back in a couple weeks.

I also saw that you tweeted about an event that is coming up at Rose City Futsal (here)?

Yeah, on November 9th. It is for Goals for Girls and it is this event where a few of my teammates and my coach, [Cindy Parlow Cone], are going to be out there playing and will be playing with the fans that come out in support as well. It is going to be a lot of fun. I think it is six to nine on a Saturday night.

I've never actually played futsal and I'm quite interested to see how that goes. I've only payed indoor, so I am excited to get out there and experience it... The facility is new too, so I am interested to see it as well.

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Check back tomorrow for part 2 and the rest of our talk with Angie Kerr-Woznuk.