The entire five-hour bus ride back from Lincoln Memorial University, I stare numbly at my notepad, my legs stretched across the dozing body of a teammate on the bus floor, my elbow propped on someone else's knee.

I start writing a sentence only to furiously scratch it out. Pen touches paper, and a mountainous writer's block hammers at my headache and stifles every feeble attempt at a sentence.

My plan is to dig deep, to find some complex and sad-but-inspirational angle to justify our loss Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Lincoln Memorial University Stadium. Nothing. So I begin to ask my teammates to give me one word; the first word that pops into their minds when they think about today's game. Between the blank stares and shrugs, I cobble together a list: "Pressure. Tough. Awful. Aggravating. Humiliating. Mindset. Decision. Redemption."

Each of these words carries weight on their own, but put them together and therein lies a perfect timeline of both today's events and what is yet to come. I realize the explanation for our loss cannot be measured with some deep psychological explanation. Like the series of simple words strung together to make one gritty list, the LMU scoreboard reading 2-0 is also a list-an accumulation of little things that we shrug off in the moment but that come back with a vengeance to tear us apart.

This 2-0 scoreboard is made up of the ten minutes we spend complaining about the biting cold during our pre-game jog and stretch instead of getting ourselves pumped for the game. It's the nonchalant stroll to load the bus at 12:14 p.m. when we are pulling out at 12:15. The walk out onto the field for warm-up with players straggling behind. The lack of communication during warm-up. The lack of excitement and urgency when we keep our legs moving to wait for the officials. Gear sitting unorganized on the bench. The long seconds we watch our center-back dribble up the field with no one moving to assist her. Ball-watching when the ball is bouncing in our box. Staying on the ground in frustration after a tackle instead of popping back up to battle again. Having to be reminded to throw away trash on the bench. And finally, we completely forget the simplicity of just playing the game because we allow the pressure of a sudden winning streak to get inside our heads.

All of these alone may not seem like a big deal in the moment, but they all snowball into a loss not just on the scoreboard, but a loss of our pride as well. Coach Samar truthfully says, "LMU did not defeat us today. We defeated ourselves."

However, we must, "remember that failure is an Event, NOT a person." (Zig Ziglar) Today as a family, we failed, but the Anderson University women's soccer team is not and never will be characterized by failure. Our loss today was a detour off of the firmly established path of our values but it is by no means a dead end.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, "My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure." We are not content. We take full responsibility for our team loss, and we pick up and surge forward.

Andy reminds us: "We don't need just one leader to rise on this team; we need a team of leaders holding each other accountable at every moment, getting on each other when you know you can do better, and encouraging each other to push forward." We are no less proud of how far we've come this season from last year or of how much closer we have become as a family. Our next two, and final regular-season matches against North Georgia and Wingate are a new day; another opportunity to play the game we love.

We firmly believe our bitter experience at LMU will be transformed into another brick to build the foundation of our legacy, because the "One Team, One Goal, & One Heart" of Anderson University Women's Soccer may be "hard pressed on every side, but we are NOT crushed, perplexed but NOT in despair, persecuted but NOT abandoned, and struck down but NOT destroyed…therefore we do NOT lose heart." 2 Corinthians 4:8-10, 16.

We would like to thank the Uldrick family for another delicious meal which was provided prior to our huge win against regionally ranked Valdosta State on Wednesday. We'd also like to thank the Neipp family for hosting our meal prior to our LMU game on Saturday as well. Thank you for all you do!