Road To Regionals - 96 Journal

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.- George Lois

Another beautiful day out in the rain today. The first session with my U12's was luckily dry and as I looked to the sky I was hoping my luck would hold out for the 3 scrimmages I had scheduled for our U9 Boys, U10 Boys and U11 Girls would hold up. Just as I was thinking that the carry over of Hurricane Ike hit us.

I wondered how my U9 Boys would react to this poor weather since they were young, but when I looked over at them they were already sliding around on the wet grass exclaiming how lucky they were to get to play in such great slide tackling weather. The boys then went on to almost outscore the Vikings and Colts game that ended somewhere around 15-12 in their game against our North boys. Lots of offense on display:)

Part way through the third scrimmage our U10 coach called me and told me that he was canceling their training session which was scheduled for the same time as the U13's session. I thought that this might not be a bad idea after spending all afternoon yesterday out in the rain and all day today out in it as well, but then I remembered that as a player I would have been upset if my coach had cancelled training due to a little rain, along with the fact that they hadn't spent the day outside, so we went ahead with training.

As I drove over to McMurray the rain stopped, for the most part, and we were able to have a semi dry session:) Thank goodness.

I wanted to get the girls moving right away since it was a little cold and wet so we started off with a game of Bulldog. This game is similar to knockout but I had the girls divided up into 4 teams. 3 teams were on the inside of the grid and all of those players had a soccer ball and they were working together. 1 team was the bulldogs who started on the outside of the grid.

When I said go 2 bulldogs from the team on the outside would enter the grid and try to knock out all the balls. Every 15 seconds I released 2 more bulldogs into the grid until all the bulldogs were in the grid.

The players on the inside protected their ball from getting kicked out by a bulldog, but once their ball was kicked out they helped the other players keep their ball inside the grid.

When all the balls were knocked out I stopped the clock. The bulldog team with the lowest time won.

After a couple games of Bulldog we went to our partner juggling. Today we had 12 groups get to double digits and a couple of groups were able to get 16.

I had decided to play a possession game with the girls today to see how our first touch was coming along.

9v4 Keep Away, 5 Passes= 1 point

-I divided the girls up into two teams of 9 and one team of 10 players

-I had two grids set up

-1 team split their team in half and they were the defenders in each of the two grids

-We played for 2 minutes and every time that the attacking team was able to put 5 consecutive passes in a row together they received a point.

-After 2 minutes we combined the score from both grids to get the defending team's score and then switched the defending team

-The team with the lowest score wins

We had some success at the game, but not as much as I had hoped, but that was ok because I wanted the girls to understand that we needed to continue to work on our first touch. The space was pretty tight so every time a player received the ball a defender was close to them. A poor first touch would almost always lead to a take away.

After the keep away we played our 7v7 games and the lights stayed on the entire time tonight!