18 Isn’t Enough

During tryouts I had handed out our schedule for the fall and it included the NSR Event over Memorial Day Weekend. At that time I asked everyone if anything on the schedule would create a conflict.

Conflicts are always going to happen in the competitive world of growing up not as a robot who does the same thing every day and only has one purpose in life, but as a human being who has an entire life full of many different activities and a family. This is a fact of life. Sometimes choices have to be made. In the big picture of things, missing a soccer training, game, or tournament is not an issue. It is just one of many during the year or your life. We just want to know as soon in advance about your impending absence.

Only one family came up to me and said that they were busy, Blitz’s. At the time we were still wondering what to do about having 19 players on the roster so when her mom said she was busy that weekend I said that it would be perfectly fine if she went with her family instead of us to soccer. While Blitz is an integral part of this team and we love to have her, this would be an easy way for me to solve our roster issue for this tournament. Now I was only worried about how to rotate the playing time with having 18 kids. Again, 18 players is not a bad problem to have, it’s just easier to work with 17 during games.

Then it started to happen. LP and her family won a free trip to New York. Yes, that’s right. They won a free trip. How lucky is that? They rarely get to travel and were very excited about the trip and asked me if they could go. I replied that of course they could go. How cool is it that they won the trip? Now we were down to a roster size of 16 players. Still OK.

Next Cassie informed me that they were busy that weekend and could not go. Not ideal, but we’re still at 15 players so no big deal. I started to work on getting guest players and I was able to get Taz, the girl who is playing on our U13 White team.

This happened the week before we took the U13 Blue team to the Eclipse Event. One of the biggest things that I saw at the Eclipse event was how out of shape our girls were. It had basically been 3 weeks since they last played a game and it showed. Due to bad weather we were only playing 40-minute games. Games that were 2x20 minute halves and we were dying. I had already been asking the girls to be working on their fitness, but after seeing the 13’s play, I reminded the girls how important conditioning would be for them since, by the time they start playing in Naperville, it will have been a month since they last played a game. The girls showed up early for both training sessions this week and did extra fitness on their own while I was running other sessions. It was very impressive to see.

Wednesday, Two Days Before We Leave.

Taz can’t go anymore and neither can Binky (pronounced bink-key) That sucks, we’re down to 14 players. Oh well, more playing time for the girls who are going. It will be a great reminder of how important conditioning is through the rest of the year as the girls are certain to get tired at some point during the tournament.

I’ve never done too much conditioning with this young of an age group because I like to let them get their conditioning through playing, but I was talking with Greg Wheaton, who is from Brasil, and he made one of the best observations about the training habits of Americans vs the training habits of Brazilians. He said “Americans will work super hard in every drill or conditioning activity, but once you put them in a scrimmage or a game, they seem to stand around a lot and not go 100%. Brazilians on the other hand might work hard in drills or conditioning, the best ones work very hard, but if you put them in a game they will reach another level of intensity.

After our last session I felt that our girls were as well prepared as they could be for the tournament and everyone is excited to get down to Naperville.