Kokkonen: The goalie who left

From October 2014

Liisa Kokkonen is one of the three Finnish goalkeepers fighting for a place in the nation’s roster for WFC2015 in Tampere, Finland. Like so many Finnish female top athletes, she has had to move to Sweden to take the next step in her development.

As this is being written, Liisa Kokkonen has just been called to Finland’s squad in the EFT tournament in Prague.  With Jonna Mäkelä out with injury, it’s Kokkonen as number three after Mäkelä and Laura Loisa whose phone rang.
In a setting like this, Liisa Kokkonen is understandably careful with her wording about the WFC dream.
- Any goalie playing on this level would like the play in the national team and minding the net on a WFC on a home rink sure would be great. The opportunities emerging are few, though, and that’s why I want to concentrate on my daily work.  When I do my best every day, a place in the national team squad would be an indication of things done correctly.
In the national team, Liisa Kokkonen has been “almost there” for a long time. Fourteen games in U19 with á WFC silver medal in 2006 in Leipzig as Janette Loponen’s backup, then 32 games in women’s national team with 2011 silver medal in Zürich as a thin icing on the cake.

Two Finnish seasons
With ten years of elite floorball under her belt, it’s surprising to realize Liisa Kokkonen only has played two seasons and 40 games in the Finnish Naisten Salibandyliiga.
- I spent my first season with Tapanilan Erä III on 2007 – 2008 on the bench, training hard and trying to challenge the then Nr 1 goalie Sanna Sihvo. Did not get to play as much as I think I would have deserved but at least I learned to do my best every time.
Everything changed the next autumn. It was all Liisa Kokkonen’s with Sanna Sihvo out with a serious knee injury but the team was different, too. A lot worse, to be honest and only a year after they had won the Finnish title.
Liisa Kokkonen now got all the minutes she wanted but it became a season of frustration. With one tie and 21 losses in 22 games, Tapanilan Erä III were relegated to 1st division without anyone blaming their goaltending.
- All season I felt I made one big save after another but yet we lost again and again. I used to come home ready to hang up my gloves for the last time but somehow I always made it back to the arena again.

Endre was a dream come true
After a nightmarish season and high school just finished, it was an easy decision to leave the country.
-  It had always been a bit of a dream for me to play in Sweden and I wrote an email to Endre and I think two other teams telling them here’s 19-year old Liisa from Finland looking for a Swedish team to join and to become the best floorball goalie in the world.
Two days later, Kokkonen got an answer asking when they should book the flight for her to come over.
Endre was really prepared. On her first visit, Liisa Kokkonen practised with the team and had a job interview and a meeting with the University studies counsellor and flew back home with a contract.
- Only later have I realized how lucky I was to end up with just Endre, Kokkonen compliments the club.
- With managers like Göran Nährström and Harald Hoffman who have worked really hard for the club for decades, it is also easy for a player to motivate herself for hard work in- and outside the rink. We have TV and radio interviews, meetings with junior teams, lunches with sponsors, shootings of ads…
Women’s floorball in Gotland is something very different from women’s floorball in Finland indeed.
- Already in preseason practice games, we have bigger audiences than in the Finnish league. With a mixture of local players and global stars like Anna Jakobsson and Corin Rüttimann, the team is big news. Local papers and radio run pregame stories, match reports and deeper stories between games. On an island like Gotland it is easier to be a popular subject than it would be in places like Stockholm or Helsinki.

More quality in Sweden
The difference between actual floorball training in Sweden in Finland is not in the quantity, Liisa Kokkonen says, but more in the quality.
- Here we use out time more efficiently. We go through the drills we’re going to run before we start and when we start, time is not spent socializing or standing around with your water bottle. Everything is done with the next game in mind and even warm-up shooting drills are planned to face to shots from the same positions as in the games. Also, there’s a lot more 5-on-5 play than back in Finland. That little extra quality in everything we do here means a lot in the long run.
A bit of a surprise is that until this season Endre did not have anyone assigned as a goalie coach.
- I have had a mentor, though, who has experience that can be mixed with my knowledge of the game for good results. Little by little, I have realized how much more there is in goaltending than that the technical and physical part that coaching goalies usually concentrates in.

Stinky Jolly kneepads
Liisa Kokkonen herself still belongs to the generation that took up floorball goaltending after starting with other things. Sports was always there, though.
- In kindergarten, I wanted to make the trip there by skis and I always wanted to attend every ball game my brothers and second cousins played. We still have all kinds of balls, sticks, shoes and skates one could imagine back home. All that must have given me a pretty good base to build on, Kokkonen says.
Actual floorball game later.  First, it was the school’s weekly sports club that inevitably turned into a floorball club. Goaltending was already there.
- I dug up the hideous stinky Jolly kneepads and an old face mask in the school closet and wanted to stop shots.
In the fifth grade, it was time to look for more.
- We went through the local newspaper with my mother looking for a floorball team and found Tapanilan Erä’s floorball school for kids. First, I was a defenseman but as soon as possible I became the goalie. First they would not let me, saying I was too good in defense for that but I refused to play anywhere else than between the posts.
Soon Liisa Kokkonen practiced with juniors four to five years older than her and on the ninth grade she played for three teams on three different age groups. Entering Mäkelänrinteen lukio, the famous Helsinki sports high school, everything became even more real.
- Floorball made the rules now and I attended something like nine practices a week plus games. I was learning to live like an athlete with the dryland training, goaltending practice sessions and everything I had missed in the younger juniors.

A lot to learn about winning mentality
Today, Liisa Kokkonen is working to take Endre as far as possible in the Swedish league and to become a regular in the Finnish national team.
- With Endre, we started the season with five straight wins to then lose against Djurgården and KAIS Mora. It’s more young skillful players and less just will power for us now and I think we have everything it takes even for the title. The autumn at least will be learning the SSL ropes and come spring and the big games, we’ll see how well we play together and whether we have found the players among us to score the winning goals.
Finland’s national team works to keep the Czechs and the Swiss behind them and to overthrow Sweden the floorball giant.
- The Swedish national team is filled with great individual skill and the amount of top players also sharpens competition and makes everyone work even harder, Liisa Kokkonen compares.
- Also, in Finland we have a lot to learn about winning mentality. Instead of complaining about our inadequacies and going “what the hell, we’re gonna lose anyway”, we will have to believe in ourselves and tell ourselves we can and we will win tonight.