Spring 2009 soccer season

Week 1:

I'm going out of my mind. The spring soccer season always starts too early for me. I have three more days until "tax season" is over and I'm working a million hours a week. Some of the parents stepped up and helped with a practice last week.

On Friday we had our first outdoor practice. We worked on some passing and throw-in drills for about 30 minutes. Then we did some shooting drills for another 15 minutes. We are sharing practice time with a team that is a division higher then us. We spent the last 45 minutes of practice scrimmaging with them. Both teams were really rusty, but we did pretty well. We lost the scrimmage 3-1, but I really wasn't playing it like a game. I had all sorts of kids not playing in their position and I was really just trying to evaluate some of my new kids. The kid who I wrote about in "Things are tough all over" looks like he might be really good.

On Saturday we played our first game of the season. It was quite the ordeal. It was an away game for us and we played about 30 minutes away. The damn Garmin kept on recalculating, so I wasn't sure it even knew where we were going. We get to the field and it is a balmy 35 degrees farenheit, windy, and pouring rain. One side of the field had a major puddle around the penalty kick area. The other coach seriously wanted to cancel the game, but after we had all hoofed it there with our stuff, I was dead set against that as arranging make up road games is a real pain in the ass.

The game started and we quickly jumped to a 5-0 half time lead. My new kid is way too good to be on my team. Don't get me wrong, I'm prefectly O.K. with having a ringer on my team, but he will clearly be on a higher team next year after we have summer tryouts. He scored a hat-trick (3 goals) in the first half and the way he plays just makes everyone else better. I don't think I've ever seen the team pass as well as they did.

As we entered the second half the temperature started to drop, but the rain kept on coming down. Everyone looked like drowned rats. I am a big believer in sportsmanship and that nothing is gained by destroying another team. These are kids after all. So I swapped out my goalie as he wanted a chance to run, I put my offense on defense, and my defense on offense. This enabled the other team to come back and now we were only up 5-3. It then started to dawn on me that maybe I needed to put everyone back in position as it would be real disappointing to blow this game. We ended up winning 7-3. I'm going to have to remember that if I'm in that situation again, to not switch it up like that until a little later in the 2nd half.

My son played an O.K. game. He got some touches and made some great passes, but didn't get a chance to shoot. He took a forearm to the face at some point in the game and his braces cut his inner lip (he refuses to wear the mouthguard as he claims he can't breath with it in). Without a doubt, this took him out of game a bit as he kept on wipeing his lip with his sleeve (it was covered in blood by the time he showed me).

I had to take two other kids home and they all made me have the heat on high in the car to warm them up. It was like a sauna.

For now we are 1-0 and everyone is happy.