Midfielder sets pace for Hoosiers

One might think when a team loses its leading scorer to graduation, the second leading returning scorer would feel added pressure to pick up the lead. Someone forgot to tell that to junior midfielder Kelly Kram.\nKram shrugged off the pressure going into this year and is more focused on having fun and working together as a team to accomplish goals.\n"I knew I was going to have to push myself really hard," Kram said. "I wanted to have a lot of fun and be really good. So going into the summer, I had the frame of mind that I had to work really hard this year. I felt like I had a lot to prove."\nKram started playing soccer at a young age in her hometown of Chesterfield, Mo., but she didn't like the sport early on.\n"I hated it at first, actually," she said. "I would cry when I would go out on the field."\nKram worked past her fears, stuck with the sport and continued her soccer career to earn three varsity letters, along with positions on all-conference and all-state teams in Missouri. She led her high school team to the 1997 state championship and was highly recruited for college play.\n"I chose to come to Indiana because my high school coach, who I'm really close to, went here," she said. "I liked the campus, and I knew some girls from St. Louis who came here. Everyone here I ever talked to loved to go to school here. I knew I was going to have fun."\nKram's freshman year started out well but took a downward turn with injury troubles. Kram first hurt her left knee and was out two weeks. At her first game back, she tore her medial collateral ligament and was sidelined for two months.\n"It was the first time I had ever been injured," she said. "Before that I had been really lucky. Maybe a pulled muscle here and there, but never anything where I was out as long as I was. That was kind of hard."\nDespite the injury early in her college career, Kram didn't seem to lose confidence.\n"She missed a good portion of the season," coach Joe Kelley said. "But she came back later into the year, around the Big Ten's and NCAA tournament and really did well. She's somebody that's a winner. She's always had confidence in herself and you can tell that."\nKram came back the next season to lead the team in assists. She was also second in goals and tied for third in shots. This season, she looks to push herself and her team to the next level.\nFive games into the season she already has three goals and two assists. Kram was also named Co-Big Ten player of the week for her efforts at the Vermont Classic earlier in the season.\n"She's having a fantastic year," former player and current assistant coach Tracy Grose said. "She has such a great vision on the field. It seems like she's involved in every play."\nGrose said Kram has picked up the slack left when she graduated last year.\n"She has certainly met the challenge," Grose said.\nAlthough Kram refuses to call herself a leader, Kelley tends to look at it differently.\n"I think she's had a tremendous impact on not only the underclassmen, as far as what is expected of them, how a winner is suppose to carry themselves on the field, off the field, but she's had that effect on everybody," he said. "It's contagious."\nKelley also turns to Kram for advice from time to time.\n"She's a very intelligent player," Kelley said. "She figures things out. She's somebody that I'll go to and ask her, 'What's up? What do you see?' That's how much respect I have for her as a player and a person."\nIt also seems as if Kram has been rubbing her mentality and work ethic onto her teammates.\n"A lot of times what she's doing out there, from a leadership stand point, doesn't stick out to everybody, but it does to the players on the field," Kelley said. "Her presence on the field gives people around her a lot of confidence and that's a sign of a good player. She makes people around her better"