3/21 8v8 Scrimmage vs U13 Boys White

Back in January I bought 12 hours of full field dome time at Holy Angels that had become available when I found out that we were not going to be able to go to Vegas.  We needed to get in some games before heading to Des Moines and this was going to be a great way for us to do that.

Luckily for us our games against the boys teams in our club were beneficial to them, as well as us, so we set up scrimmages with all 4 teams: U13 White Boys, U12 West Boys, U12 South Boys, and U13 Girls Blue.

The extra dome time that was available I used to set up scrimmages for our Academy teams.  The first hour of time today was supposed to feature 2 U9 games on one half of the field and a U10 game on the other half.  When I arrived at the dome Edina baseball was using half of the dome.  I figured that they must have bought the dome time before us and were going to finish by 8am because we have had the full dome starting at 8am every single Saturday since November.

As we approached 8am and the batting cage nets were still up in the middle of the field I went over and asked some of the baseball people when they would be finishing.  They told me 12pm.

I told them they must be wrong because we always have the full dome starting at 8am.  A lady pulled out her permit and they were listed as having the time.  I made a phone call to Cook to see what was up.  To my surprise he actually answered.  After checking over our permit, it turned out that Edina did have 1/2 the dome and no one had caught it.

I wasn't upset that we hadn't caught this, but I was pissed at Holy Angels.  How can they sell one random Saturday to an outside organization.  We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at that dome and we shouldn't be bumped from our time for someone who spends one weekend there.

This time was originally supposed to be used for MRL games.  That would have been a nightmare.

I gathered all of our coaches and we devised how we would go about the first hour with having 3 games.  We split our 1/2 into 1/4's and left space for two 3v3 fields with pugg goals.  The U9's split their time between playing 6v6 on a 1/4 field and having two games of 3v3 on the smaller fields.  The next two hours were ok because we only had two games for the 9am hour and one game for the 10am hour.

I was still upset when it was our turn to play because now we would have to play 8v8 rather than 11v11.  The thing that upset me the most was that the kids would play less because both us and the U13 Boys had pretty full rosters.

We got on with the scrimmage and it was decent.  With the small field the boys put us under a ton of pressure defensively with their speed so it was really good for us.  Our goal was to see how often we could put together 4, 5, or 6 passes in a row while looking to go forward.

Both teams had multiple chances but it took until the 16th minute when we turned the ball over in the back and the boys capitalized to take the lead.  1 minute after that the boys scored again, and then put in another one from beyond half field inside of another minute.  Wow.  From 0-0 to 0-3 in 3 minutes.  That was not good.

Half time came and we regrouped.  I did not care about the score of the game, but I stressed to the girls the importance of leadership when things are not going our way.  We really needed someone on the field to take charge after the boys scored and make sure that we continued to play well. 

The boys scored twice more in the second half but I was happy with the way we played.  I thought we played well the first 15 minutes of the game and the second half.  We just had 10 minutes at the end of the first half that really hurt us.

After the game the boys were very complimentary of the girls and their skill which was very nice of them.

I wish we would have been able to play 11v11 but I'm sure that trying to stay composed on the ball with the pressure we were under in this game will prepare us for our next two games.