No I in team

Selfless focus on mutual success
fuels driving force in SUU soccer

By DAVID PAYSTRUP
UNIVERSITY JOURNAL

Although she just experienced a loss in last Saturday’s exhibition to University of Utah, SUU soccer forward Ilene Dixon is optimistic that team unity will bring a successful 2002 season.
For an athlete that had high school titles in basketball, cross country, track and field, and helped lead the Mountain View Bruins to a 5A region soccer title and two of Utah State 5A championship games, she keeps coming back to kick the black and white ball.
It’s having a cohesive group of players that drives Dixon to play her best in the first place.
She came to SUU her freshman year in Fall 1999 as member of the cross country and track programs but missed soccer.
Dixon cut back to the soccer scene during the early stages of SUU soccer when it was still the soccer club, not yet in official NCAA intercollegiate play.
Cross country is team oriented in the fact that it gives points for overall team placement determined by how runners place individually; there is one key point of soccer that sets it apart from a cross country trail.
“It’s not just running,” she said. “It’s running with a purpose.”
Dixon’s individual cross country 5A state title came as a side to her senior year of play on the soccer field. She joined the team to help them to another state title.
Slow to brag about her accomplishments, Dixon in one week in October of 1998 not only ran but won after “shaking off a mild concussion” from a soccer practice two days previous to the race, according to an article in the Provo Daily Herald.
“It just so happened that I won,” she recalled. “But I was still very sad because my team took second. So it was bittersweet.”
She defeated Laura Zeigle of Bingham High School, but Mountain View’s team fell to Bingham by one point that day, even though Dixon’s objective in joining the team was to help Mountain View retain its five years of reigning over 5A girls’ cross country.
“I would much rather have had that team win than the individual win,” she said.
After high school, Dixon came to Cedar City.
Although she visited a variety of campuses, she said she felt that SUU “was a good fit.”
Though her play on the field is aggressive, Dixon looks at herself as a finesse player whose focus on the game is rarely upset by opponents.
She’s not easily upset or offended by most things on or off the field.
“It’s very hard for a person to get into my games,” she said. “To get me away from my focus they are going to have to do a lot.”
At home in her room, that same easy attitude follows as she relaxes to U2 with photographs of her family around her.
The second to youngest, she is known by her entire family as the “athlete.”
Her older siblings danced, her younger brother is a runner, but her niche is sports, she said.
Her earliest childhood memories stem back to recreation center soccer play when she was in the fourth grade.
She’d kick the ball around in her backyard for hours.
Everywhere she went on game day, she wore her jersey.
Her fondest game memory came on her birthday, Sept. 10, when she scored a hat trick (three goals in a game) against Jordan High.