Looking up into the stands before the start of the Penn State men's soccer game Friday night vs. Northwestern, Christoph Ascherl saw a variety of people ducking under umbrellas. But the freshman forward from Bruehl, Germany, was only looking for two in particular -- his parents.

It might not be all that unusual for a player to do this, but it becomes a rarity when on most days you don't wake up in the same time zone, country or continent as your parents. Ascherl's parents had flown in, enduring an unlikely travel route -- Frankfurt to Dallas to Pittsburgh -- to watch their son play a couple games.

"I was pretty scared," Ascherl said. "I thought they didn't want to come because of the rain. Like, they weren't here, you know, thinking they came all this way and then probably like, 'Nah, it's raining, I'm not going out to watch.' "

As unlikely as it is that his parents, Oscar and Miriam, would spend all that time and money to not go to the games, they are just about as devoted as parents can be. While they can no longer attend every one of his games, as they did when Christoph was playing club soccer in Germany, they can follow the games online. But due to the six-hour time difference, it's usually a late night proposition to do so.

"I wake up for his games in the middle of the night," Miriam said. "I wake up naturally. We're thinking all day about his game."

This is no change for the Ascherls, who are stitched together by soccer. Christoph's two older brothers played soccer, and Oscar played for the University of Maryland when he immigrated to the United States in 1958.

"[We] live it, breathe it, dream it," Miriam said.

See The devotion to the game even tugs at their national heritages. When Oscar said that Christoph would like to play in the German Bundesliga after graduation, Miriam, who is an Irish citizen, immediately lobbied for the Irish National League instead. Talk about advance planning, considering it was about their child who hasn't finished even one semester of college.

But to travel the globe and play hopscotch on the world atlas is nothing new for Christoph, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Ireland because of his mother's status. He lived in the United States until 1995 when his family moved to Germany, where Oscar is the chief of budget personnel for the U.S. Government's Armed Forces Network.

For all the moves and citizenship issues, every part of Christoph -- especially his stomach -- goes back to Germany.

"I'm not used to the food," Christoph said. "I'm used to my mom cooking my food my whole life. I think I better learn how to cook or something."

He'll get Miriam's Italian and German cuisine when he goes back home at Christmas, but for now, he's somewhat marooned in town. Since moving to State College in August, he said it's been hard getting used to college life, and sometimes calls home in the middle of his parents' night.

"You get a bit lonely," Christoph said. "You want to know what's going on back home."

It's as much of an adjustment for his parents, who find the house pretty empty. Christoph was always soft-spoken around the house, according to Oscar, but he's also the youngest of the children and very close to his parents.

In his near-whisper speech and little laughs, it shows. Even at the height of Christoph's aggressiveness on the soccer field, he tucks his hands into his long sleeves like he lost his mittens. As much as his six-foot frame and soccer-obsessed personality would tell you otherwise, it would seem that the inner child also made it to Happy Valley.

Regular e-mails and phone calls make the changes manageable, though it's still not the same.

"Sure, I would have loved for him to stay," Miriam said. "[But] we think he got a wonderful opportunity. He got to do what he loves doing."

It wasn't until his family's move to Germany that he picked the game up heavily. But he's only tightened his grip on it, talking nearly exclusively about soccer. Even with his diet, it's about getting the right nutrients and energy. Some people say he's boring for that fact, but Christoph's concerned more with playing as deep into the season as possible.

His desire to play the game was the catalyst for Christoph coming to Penn State, one of a handful of Div. I schools to which he applied. After Oscar sent men's soccer coach Barry Gorman a DVD of game film, Christoph talked with Gorman and was convinced.

It also helped that Gorman is from Northern Ireland and the Nittany Lions have a number of foreign players. Between the Finnish, Serbian, Canadian and Brazilian players on the team, it's a regular United Nations and a quality that helps Christoph feel at home, if only temporarily.

"It's nice to speak German a bit. It's nice sometimes to talk about home, and, you know, make fun of other guys," Christoph said. "We can get away with that cause no one understands us."

But on Friday, there were at least two people who did understand him and love him, standing quietly under separate umbrellas and hoping for a Lions victory. Like Christoph, they were fairly quiet, but they didn't travel hundreds of miles to make noise.

And when Christoph scored his first goal of the season more than 84 minutes into the game, there was no mad dash to the computer to check the score, no trans-Atlantic celebration. They could see it on the Jeffrey Field scoreboard. They were there.