Heimerdinger does it all for Kaneland

Emily Heimerdinger does not like to lose.

Period. End of sentence. Do not try to qualify that statement. Ask her what she thinks about losing, and you get a series of statements spit back at you like a sledgehammer slamming spikes into a mountainside.

“I hate losing,” she said. “I can’t stand it. I don’t like it at all.”

On the girls soccer field, Heimerdinger has had to lose a few games over the years. And she’s not liked any of them.

“I can’t stand to lose anywhere,” Heimerdinger said. “It comes from my family. We grew up playing games all the time. My parents challenge me. I really can’t stand losing.”

Ask Kaneland girls soccer coach how focused Heimerdinger is, and he says that if she played against a group of 5-year-olds, she’d still be trying to win.

“She wouldn’t be doing it to be mean,” Parillo said. “But she’s not going to lose to anybody without putting up a fight. That’s just her. If there was a bunch of little kids around, she’d make them play. She would say ‘look, if you want to beat me, you have to play. I’m not just going to fall down.’”

Asked about, Heimerdinger’s response was straightforward: “Yeah, that’s happened.”

Now before you get the idea that Emily Heimerdinger keeps a pitchfork in her school locker, let’s take a step backward. Soccer is a team sport, and to win, it takes the contributions of 11 players. And if the goal is to win, then everyone has to be involved. So the manifestation of that driving spirit is an unbelievably team-oriented player.

“She can also distribute,” Parillo said. “She’s the point guard on our girls basketball team. We’ve been putting her in midfield in practice instead of forward and she’s putting passes right on people’s feet. And then she still scores when we ask her to do that.”

Scoring is what has brought much attention Heimerdinger’s way. In three seasons, she has scored 63 goals for the Knights and enters her senior season as the school’s leading goal-scorer. There is, however, a common refrain that when a player scores as many goals as Heimerdinger has, there must be some gross on-field selfishness involved. To allege that, Parillo says, means you haven’t watched much, or any Kaneland girls soccer in the last three years.

“First, everything she’s done, she’s done while getting double- and triple-teamed,” Parillo said. “But she also took every single corner kick last year. That’s not where her goals come from. She didn’t take a single penalty kick.

“People say ‘well, she’s just a goal scorer and that’s it. I think ‘thank God she’s a goal scorer because we need those too. (Heimerdinger) has 63 goals and she’s got 30-some assists in her career. I get kind of upset when people go to those postseason awards meetings and they remind me it’s not just scoring goals.’ She does so much more for us.”

Although 63 goals have had her name on them over three seasons, Heimerdinger would give up all of them for the school’s first regional title or any other sign of overall team success.

“I’m all about the team and I’m all about winning,” she said. “I don’t care how many goals I score. I just want to win and to do it for my team.”

That competitive streak is always there, and the end result of a forward’s work is goal scoring — so the two are always going to be linked in Heimerdinger’s accomplishments. Parillo pointed to a match in 2008 when he benched his future star because she wasn’t playing well.

“I told her ‘you let me know when you’re ready,’” Parillo said. “She came in and scored three goals.”

The match is also imprinted in Heimerdinger’s mind as well. She had never been benched for non-productivity before, and it hasn’t happened since.

“It was at Marengo and I was out it and it just wasn’t working,” Heimerdinger said. “(Parillo) was getting really upset because I was getting shots and not scoring. He took me out and it felt like forever. He said ‘you come and get me when you’re ready to play.’ It seemed like a long time, but I came up to him right after and said I was ready. I don’t like sitting on the bench. I thought that but didn’t say it. I don’t remember the goals, but I wanted to try to help the team and we ended up getting the win.”

Those last six words are the key ones to the story. Everything else is interesting, but to Heimerdinger, the fact that the Knights won that match was all-important.

“There’s no way I could stand to have her on the bench with me,” Parillo said. “She’d drive me crazy. It’s hard to take her off the field because she has that determination. She so wants to win a regional championship. She came up to me before the season started and said ‘I wouldn’t care if we didn’t win a game in the regular season so long as we won the regional championship.’”

The reality of the 2011 season is that Kaneland may have some growing pains on the field. Only three starters remain last year’s 15-3-5 season. So Heimerdinger and her 22-goal, 17-assist output may move into the midfield to solidify things.

This leads to thoughts of how Heimerdinger will deal with things if the Knights struggle early in the season.

“I know I’d try my hardest to be OK with it, but inside, I know I’ll be really mad,” Heimerdinger said. “I know it’s going to take time to get to that point and it’s going to take a couple of games to get going.”

But for seniors, the end of season is always hanging out there like the caboose on the end of a train that always seems to be barreling down the tracks far too quickly.

“She’s already mentioned to me ‘I don’t have time,’” Parillo said. “She’s been a captain for a couple of years and she’s going to lead these players. She’ll let them know when they screw up but she’ll also tell them when they make a good pass. But there is a sense of urgency. She told our freshman that one of the seniors told her when she was freshman that her high school career would go like a blur, and she told our current freshmen to enjoy it because it’s going to go quick.”

In the Kaneland High School classroom, “losing” means getting poor grades. And the senior takes that achievement just as seriously as she does the competition on a soccer field.

“I’ve never gotten a B,” she said.

One teacher had a chance to ruin that unblemished record, and couldn’t do it.

“I had her in class and told her that I might be the first teacher to give her a B,” Parillo said. “She had 99 percent and I thought it would be hard to justify that grade.”

If Heimerdinger dislikes losing and dislikes poor grades, you may ask yourself what it is that makes her smile. Of many possible answers, one is wearing a sporting uniform that says “Kaneland” somewhere on it. She has resisted any suggestion of playing club soccer during her high school season in order to continue representing her school.

“When you come to Kaneland, it is such a small school,” Heimerdinger said. “When you get players who can help with your school, then you should do that. You go to this school every day and you should want to say ‘I love and support my school.’ I would rather do that than anything with a club sport.”

Heimerdinger also loves being on the field wearing that uniform, or whatever practice gear she carries.

“I look forward to all the games and the practices,” she said. “I don’t always manage to do this, but I try to be the first one out there because I love to play. I just love the feeling of playing.”

At some point, the season will end, and Heimerdinger will leave Kaneland with the two other seniors on the varsity team. And that will leave Parillo in a foul mood.

“It’s going to stink when she graduates,” Parillo said. “But it’ll stink when Sophie (Blank) and Amy (Fabrizius) also graduate. Those are all four-year starters and they’ve seen an evolution of Kaneland soccer.”