The glow of the spotlight is more intense for certain positions in sports. A pitcher steps onto an elevated dirt stage in baseball and a quarterback assumes the starring role on the gridiron. On the soccer pitch, however, it is the goalkeeper who is often on an island.

“It’s pretty tense,” said Beckett Bergstrom, a 14-year-old goalkeeper for the Kaw Valley Soccer Association’s Robots in the Sky team. “If you mess up, you get scored on.”

He said when mistakes are made at the position, it is easy for goalkeepers to become upset with their play and start to second guess their own decisions.

“There’s a little bit more pressure on the goalkeeper,” he said.

That island sun can get hot. What’s worse – sometimes the island can seem deserted.

Isolated goalkeepers often endure lulls in the action. There are times in a match when they just stand on the proverbial beach for minutes on end, watching the ball on the opposite side of the field like a faraway seagull.

“You just sort of sit around,” Bergstrom said.

But goalkeepers can not just bask in the sun or relax with their favorite book if their opponents are not on the attack.

“You just have to stay focused and wait until they get the ball,” Adam Wangler, 14, the KVSA Plutonium’s goalie, said.

At least in those situations the keeper can take on the role of spectator and stay mentally involved. When the KVSA’s Southwest team was on the field Nicholas Shaheed, 12, stayed focused in the net by watching the action. He said he had to fight off meandering thoughts of homework or evening plans instead of shots off an opponent’s boot.

And in the goalkeeper’s bag of tricks there are other ways to stay occupied.

At the top of a keeper’s to-do list: “Yell out orders to the defenders so they don’t slack off,” Wangler said.

Eventually, the goalkeeper becomes the focal point in the game – even if it is only a few times a match – when the opposing team attacks.

“I just try to look at them and see the ball and try to see where they’re going to move the ball,” Wangler said of sizing up the opposition.

He said keepers find success if they play the role of the aggressor.

“You need to be a lot more aggressive than most positions because if you just back up until they shoot, it’s going to go in,” Wangler said.

In some situations, such as corner kicks, goalkeepers become analysts as they size up the attack.

“You think about who they’re going to kick it to and make sure they can’t get a good shot,” Bergstrom said.

Ask any goalkeeper what the toughest part of surviving the island is and the answer is simple – penalty kicks.

Unfortunately, analysis in those situations usually doesn’t help.

“It’s more of a guessing game,” Wangler said. “You just pick right or left and dive that way and hope that that’s where they go with the kick.”

“You can get really scared,” Bergstrom said. “There’s no actual way to judge it.”

Because of the penalty kick’s unpredictability, he said keepers should not feel bad about giving up a goal in that situation, and in turn, teammates do not treat a defeated goalie like a castaway.

“They try to keep your morale up,” Bergstrom said.

At the other end of the island spectrum, there is not a better feeling than the one a goalkeeper gets after making a diving save in a close game.

“Making a good save feels great because you just saved your team,” Bergstrom said. “Everybody’s depending on you.”

Talk about being on an island.