Road To Regionals - 96 Journal

I can't stand having time off. For me a day off is only having to do stuff for the website during the day and coaching at night. Every two months or so I will make myself take an entire day off where I can't coach or work on anything work related. An entire day off with nothing to do usually leaves me in a state of confusion for the first half of the day. The rest of the day is spent remembering how much I love coaching and how I want to do it all the time. This is sufficient to refuel my drive for the next two to six months.

Tryout time meant time off from coaching for me. Just evaluations at night 4 nights of the week. Too much time off. So as soon as I had my team selected I set our schedule and got us started right away. We are going to two tournaments this fall.

NSR Gold Cup

August 31-September 3rd

Nike Classic Cup

October 12-14

I was able to take last year's U12 age group to the NSR Cup and I left the tournament feeling that we could compete skill wise with the other teams, but we did not have the same amount of experience on the large field that the teams we were playing did. This led me to the belief that I felt that we had not shown as well as we could have due to a lack of preparation on my part. I was not going to make that same mistake again with this group so we hit the large field as soon and as often as we could.

Starting on the 14th of August, just two days after tryouts, I scheduled 6 training sessions and scrimmages against the teams listed below in preparation for NSR.

U13 Bangu Blue (one and a half games)

U12 Bangu South (twice)

U13 TC Fire

While we are still going in with less experience on the large field than the Chicago teams since they have been playing 11v11 since late July and early August, at least we have had some time getting used to the field and all the space out there. It is quite funny watching them out there their first couple of times on the big field. All that space and so many different ideas of where to be and what to be doing.