Coolness personified, players and fish love him
BY MARC WEBER
Chilling in a row boat, shirt off, feet up, fly rod probing the waters of the Tunkwa Lake Resort outside Kamloops, Jay Nolly felt a million miles away from a soccer field in late June.
But that Nolly isn't so far from the one who helped the Whitecaps to a 3-0-4 record last month, a stretch that included a 2-0-3 road trip and closed with the big goalkeeper stealing points in unkind Montreal and Portland.
"He's very, very calm," said defender Nelson Akwari. "If anybody watched the past two games, the chances that we were giving up were pretty shocking, and the fact he didn't rip our heads off is a testament to him.
"His personality helps us." There was no yelling and screaming; just plenty of punching, parrying and smothering of soccer balls.
Head coach Teitur Thordarson reckons Nolly prevented a 3-0 deficit at the half in Montreal (the Whitecaps won 2-1). In Portland, a 0-0 tie, Nolly made seven saves for his 11th shutout in 20 games.
Vancouver's defending has made Nolly's life simple and serene much of the season; now he's taken a turn to make his teammates look good.
"After a long road trip, sometimes you need a keeper to come up big and luckily for me I made key saves," he said.
The June road trip was split in two. In between stints away from home, with his wife out of town, Nolly had planned a four-day Interior getaway.
He's camped and fly fished since his days growing up in Colorado. And at the University of Indiana, where he won back-to-back NCAA titles, he helped claim the Big Ten Conference bass fishing championship.
"I stayed in a little tiny cabin," Nolly said of Tunkwa Lake. "I woke up at 6:30-7, had a cup of coffee, some oatmeal, packed peanut butter and jellys, fished all day until 9:30 at night, made a fire, made some food and went to sleep.
"The only time I talked was to the head dude a couple of times. Just totally getting away from everything. I didn't really think about soccer at all. I was really just trying to figure [the fish] out."
He did. Nolly caught his share of rainbow trout, a few in the 20-inch range, and released them all. He'd brought up some steaks for dinner.
Back on the field, he's had very little to fish out of his net. Nolly says goal-keeping coach Mike Salmon has plenty to do with that.
Nolly credited his biggest save in Portland, a close-range reaction stop just before halftime, directly to Salmon's unique box drills, where he sets up something resembling a mini-golf hole and ricochets balls on net to improve reflexes.
But it is Nolly's mentality, as much as his strength on crosses and shot-stopping ability, that has him favoured for a Major League Soccer job.
"For me, it's extremely important for the back line to have somebody behind them who doesn't panic," said Thordarson. "I have never seen him panic in a game, no matter how important the game."
"The older I get," said Nolly, 28, "the better angles I see and the more relaxed I become. That helps me. I don't try and speed things up or get too hectic when shots are coming in. I don't worry about outside stuff, I just keep playing.
"As a youth, now I see how I let that stuff affect me."
Nolly barely blinked when Indian national team goalkeeper Subrata Paul showed up on trial last month -- the Indian press predictably hyping the move.
Paul, it turned out, had a better chance of deposing Marlon James and Cornelius Stewart as the team's top cricketers.
With the international transfer window about to open, more potential distractions approach. But Nolly will take them in the same manner he fishes, and tends goal: calmly.
"You just can't worry about it or you'll start losing faith in yourself," he said. "Let it fall where it is; just play well and hopefully they want you."
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