NSR Gold Cup Game #3 vs Sirens

I went to this game early because the game that was being played right before ours could have had an impact on us. Eclipse from the other bracket was playing Strikers FV. If Eclipse won the would win their group and Strikers FV would have strong chance of getting the wild card due to goal differential. We were hoping for a Strikers win to ensure that the wild card would come out of our group. Strikers ended up winning enabling us to just focus on winning and not needing to win by a certain amount of goals.

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I’ve found that anytime you let the kids know that they need to win by X amount of goals, they only focus on that. Because they become so focused on the final score, they don’t do the little things right that produce the final score. Or if they do get to the certain amount of goals they do one of two things: relax too much and allow a sloppy goal or they tense up and play with the fear of not letting in a goal and their play goes down hill as the fear creeps in. I was glad that the group of parents that I had at the tournament were not what I call “Scoreboard Junkies.” Parent’s who live and die by watching the scoreboard and playing out every possible scenario. They go through all the “What if’s” and “We need this team to do this and that team to do that.” It takes the focus off what we need to do. To clarify my stance, I actually have no issue with parents doing this as long as they keep the information for just the parents and the coaches. As long as the kids can go into the game and just focus on doing the little things right and having fun, the results will take care of themselves.

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So for the scoreboard junkies here is where we were at going into the game. If we won by one goal we would take the wild card spot. If we won by two goals or more we would win our group. If we tied we would more than likely be eliminated because I couldn’t imagine the Eclipse team that we played earlier losing to the Kickers.

Before the game we went over how I wanted us to play. We were going to play a 4-4-1-1. Sirens had a great sweeper who was one of the two stars of the game when they played Eclipse. She was fast, read the game well, and had a great leg. Eclipse had let her stay free the whole game and she ate up any through ball and any players who beat their marks one on one. Our plan was to have Sonic or Erika stay up high on her and beat her to any ball. Even if this meant being marked by one of their defenders and the sweeper. This is a confusing concept to most players. “So Coach, you want me to be marked by two players instead of one? Wont that make it tough for me?” The answer is yes; it could be tough for you. But if you read the game well, you can still get the ball and if you stay up high you can still get to through balls. The real key is that this player is creating space for everyone else and stretching the field for us.

We also talked about Siren’s outside mid #7. She also had lit up Eclipse with her speed on the wings. She had delivered great crosses and set up a couple of goals. I instructed the girls that whatever side she was on, I wanted Hannah to be playing defense on that side marking her and Carly playing outside mid on that side recovering early and helping Hannah out. We were not going to give her the space to run at us since Carly would be able to pressure her early and Hannah would be able to take anything away when she tried to run past us.

We also talked about the importance of keeping possession of the ball and trying to make quick passes instead of booting the ball down the field. In the game against Eclipse we had played too much boot ball and our play struggled because of it. We need to try and play skilled soccer for us to be successful.

The game started and we were on fire. The girls did everything I asked of them and they saw it working. The more we passed the more confident we became. 15 minutes into the half we had the ball in their end and our forwards and mids were pressuring the ball. Ricky, our right defender, had pushed up into the space I talk about a lot. It is a magical space that the ball always gets cleared too or just happens to go to. As she moved into the space the ball came rolling to her and she hammered the ball from about 35 yards out into the far corner of the net and a 1-0 lead.

At half time we talked about how important it was for us to stay with the game plan. Don’t allow the sweeper to be free and don’t allow #7 to beat us on the outside. We also talked about how our quick passing was working and how we were so confident because of it. The only adjustment I had to add to that was that when we are playing at the regional level against good teams, there are going to be times that we are going to be trapped in our end for 3-5 minutes at a time and not be able to get out. When we find our selves in these situations we can try to pass the first time we win the ball and the second time we win the ball. But if we’ve tried to pass the ball out twice and we haven’t gotten the ball up the field we need to play the ball long, get it in their half and try to pressure them up there.

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Positioning of the ball on the field can be more important than who actually has possession of the ball.

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The second half started and we got trapped in our end. We kept trying to make short passes and after one or two we would lose it and still be in our end. The toughest thing that I am working on with my coaching is not yelling out a lot of instructions when we are in trouble, but instead letting the kids work it out on their own. If I can have positive body language on the sideline and look calm, even when we are under pressure, then the girls on the field know that I trust them and they can handle the situation. If I start yelling and screaming it can make the girls panic and no matter how well intentioned the instructions are, they can end up hurting us.

We ended up weathering the storm at the start of the half and despite being stuck in our end for the first seven minutes we didn’t give up any real chances. After that we started rolling. 12 minutes in Gaffer laced another goal into the far corner for her 3^rd of the tournament, not bad for someone who has spent a lot of the tournament playing center back, and in the 18^th minute we sealed the win with Bella putting home her first goal of the tournament. I was confident being up 3 goals, and the girls remembered from the first game how important goal differential can be so they continued playing well and the game finished 3-0 to the good guys.

I was very happy after the game. Our forwards had done such a good job in the first half of disrupting their sweeper that they didn’t play with one in the second half and their team was lost without her back there. Carly and Hannah didn’t let #7 free once the whole game. At one time in the second half their coach switched her to the other side to see if she could get free, but as soon as we could our outside players switched sides so they could be by her. I was curious to see if their coach would keep having her switch sides and how that would affect the game, but it never happened.

With the 3-0 win we ended up winning the group and we get to play the Grand Rapids Crew Jr team in the Semifinal tomorrow. The good and the bad of winning the group is that if we had placed second we would have gotten an easier opponent in the semifinal. The Crew has outscored their opponents 27-1 in their three group games. I would have liked to meet them in the final, but I am glad we get a chance to play a team of their caliber.

Mini Magic

Before our third game against the Sirens I arrived at the field early to watch another game. As I went up to the field I saw Magic and her family hanging out in a nice shaded area. I started talking with them when I noticed Mini Magic. Magic’s 7 year old brother. He was a 3 foot tall juggling machine. He informed me that he could juggle 79 times with just his feet. As the girls showed up I asked him to juggle a little bit for them. They were all in awe of him and I heard comments like; “I could never do that many juggles with my feet.” When I heard those comments I had Mini M stop and I asked him how he got so good at juggling with his tiny feet. He said that he just works on it a lot. If he can do it, there is no reason that you girls cannot do it if you have the desire to, I informed the girls.

Then I showed Mini Magic a trick where you juggle the ball and catch it between your ankles and do a side rainbow out of it. He watched me do it three times, thought about it for a minute. Threw the ball up in the air and on his fourth try he caught it and did the side rainbow. Wow I can’t wait to show him some more tricks.

NSR Gold Cup Game #2 vs Eclipse Select

NSR Gold Cup Day 2

It was a busy day of soccer today with all four of our teams each having two games, meaning that between Mark and me, we would be coaching 8 games today. Spader, the guy who sets up all the NSR events and runs National Soccer Ranking, does a great job of working with our teams so Mark and I are always able to cover the games between the two of us.

My first game of the day was with our South U12’s against Eclipse Select East. I was interested to see how the girls would come out in this game after having a rough first game. Eclipse had won their first game by a score of 4-0. Much to my delight the girls came out strong and scored early off a corner kick. Then Eclipse scored two goals and I kept hearing negative statements from the girls on the sidelines. Saying things like, “Oh, it’s over now.” and “Here we go again.” I can’t stand statements like these. It takes all the energy out of a team even if it is just one player saying it.

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You have to always have the belief that no matter what happens you can come back. Always expect the best things to happen for you. If they aren’t happening at this moment, you have to believe that your fortunes will be changing shortly.

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After speaking to the girls about this we won a corner kick with no time left in the half and scored the tying goal. We took the lead off another corner kick in the second half. We had 3 corners and we scored 3 goals, incredible. Eclipse ended up tying the game up and we finished the game tied 3-3. A very good game and a good battle for the South girls.

Next it was off to the East U12 game against Eclipse Select, this is the home base program for Eclipse based out of Libertyville. I was fairly confident going into the game after watching Eclipse get handled rather easily in the first half of their game that I watched yesterday. While watching their game I hadn’t seen anyone who stood out or any particular strengths that I felt we needed to watch out for. I decided to start the girls in the 4-3-3 formation with the hope that our defenders and midfielders would continue to learn how to operate with no outside mids.

The game began in a back and forth fashion until Eclipse began to dominate us in the air. Every single time we had a goal kick or a punt they won the ball and kept us in our end. I feel that we are pretty good in the air and we have 7 girls who are strong headers of the ball, but the girls just didn’t seem to understand how important it was to win the aerial battles. Everyone was looking for someone else to do the work and then they would pick up the pieces. That cannot happen at this level. Everyone has to put in the work all the time.

We were also struggling with our marking. Eclipse would come forward in waves and no body on our team wanted to step up and direct our team. Because of this our girls were defending individually against a very good team . . . A much different team than I saw yesterday. Darn 12 year olds, why can’t they be consistent from day to day?

Anyways, around the 16^th minute our poor marking led to a partial clearance that sent the ball high in the air out to the side of our box. Gaffer went up for the header but she misjudged it slightly and the ball missed her head and hit her hand. The ref blew for a penalty. It was a soft call since the ball wasn’t going to goal and there was no one around her in a dangerous position to get the ball after she missed it, but it was a penalty nonetheless. Their girl stepped up to take the penalty and the ref asked her to hold on, as he wanted the girls to get outside of the arc on top of the box. The only problem was that there was no arc. Curiously instead of just guessing where the arc would be he let the girls start right behind the penalty taker. I thought this would be good for us since it might make the shooter more nervous, but she stepped up and struck the penalty well low to the left side of the goal. AJ barely got a finger to it, but the ball was hit well and went into the back of our net to put us down 1-0.

The rest of the half was controlled by Eclipse as we struggled to get any kind of rhythm going and continued to have problems marking up. We did well enough defensively to not give up many dangerous chances, but at half time we could feel lucky to only be down one goal.

Half Time Points

-Someone needs to take control in back and get us marked up. Communication is key and it has to be done all the time since the game is always changing.

-We are getting killed in the air. They are winning everything and trapping us in our end. We need to get to where the punts and goal kicks are going to go to and win the ball.

-They were playing with a sweeper and she was getting everything that we were playing long. We need one of our forwards to always be close enough to the sweeper so we can beat her to any ball.

-We are not out of this game. Come out and battle hard, win the air battles, communicate and things will start going our way.

The second half started and we had a good game on our hands. I was happy to see that our girls had not gotten down after the first half. The game was played in the midfield but again we struggled to find any rhythm offensively because we were rushed and we were only looking to play the ball long to our forwards. In the 51^st minute Eclipse won a throw in on our right hand side. They had a girl who could do very good flip throws and she tossed it all the way into our 6-yard box. Our outside mid who had started out marked up had turned her back on the girl she was defending and did not see her make a quick dash to the ball and tap it in for their second goal.

It stinks to get scored on and put us in a 2-0 hole, but inside I was very happy that Eclipsed actually capitalized on this cross. Our marking had been poor all game and watching them score on us drives home the point of why it is so important to face up the field while marking so you can see both the ball and your player. Going down 2 goals also put this team in a situation that they have rarely been in and I wanted to see how we would react.

We reacted brilliantly. For the first time all game we started to pass the ball around a bit and two minutes after they scored we were on the board. LK won the ball deep in our half and played a great one two with Jordy. LK then hit a one time ball for Sonic (Maddie B), who was deep with their sweeper thus giving us a chance to hit her for the through ball. She went in on the goalie and tucked a nice shot on the ground under the sliding keeper. It was excellent.

With 3 minutes left we won a free kick from about 20 yards outside the box. It was too far out to shoot it so I told Rickey to get everyone lined up on the far side of the box and she should chip it in just outside the six-yard box. She hit a perfect chip, she told me later that the reason it was so perfect was that she fell down as she was hitting it, gotta love the honesty. We timed our runs perfectly and Jordy almost connected on a volley after she broke free from her defender. The shot ended up going just wide. The final score was

2-1 in favor of the Eclipse.

The girls were upset that they lost. I was happy because I knew that us losing this game would drive home the point about needing to mark up properly all the time. At this level you can lose a game if you are not doing things perfectly all the time. I guarantee that if we had ended up tying that game the importance of marking would be lost on the girls since everything had turned out ok. After the game I made sure the girls thought about how they felt and asked them if they wanted to feel that way again. If they wanted to feel this way again in the future because they had not been mentally tuned in and let their mark get away from them for the goal that put us behind. Then I told them that I don’t blame the girl who let her mark get away from her. I blame everyone else on the field and on the bench, including myself, for not making sure that she was marking correctly. We either have everyone doing things correctly on the field or it is the team’s fault.

Then I asked the girls to think about how they felt after they went down 2-0. I asked them if they had felt that the game was over. They said they felt that they could still win even though they were down 2 goals with less than 10 minutes left. I agreed with them and they showed it in their play. The last 10 minutes showed great determination by the girls. That is the thing I love the most about this group. They always battle. They always believe they can win. I told them to remember that feeling and use it anytime things are not going their way.

I then informed the girls about the importance of their shutout yesterday and how important it was that they did not fold after the second goal today because if we were to win our second game we could still win the group based on goal differential. After two games the standings looked like this:

Team Wins Losses GF GA

Sirens 2 0 6 2

Bangu 1 1 4 2

Eclipse 1 1 3 6

Kickers0 2 0 4

If we beat the Sirens by two goals or more we would automatically advance. If we won we had a chance to get the wild card spot. But I had no time to dwell on those fun details; I had another game to coach. Man do I love these days filled with games all day long.

NSR Cup Game #1 vs Chicago Kickers

Final: Bangu 3 Chicago Kickers 0

Finally we had a great day to play soccer. The weather was perfect. 70 degrees and sunny, it couldn't get any better. Quite a change from last weekends rain soaked fields. I left the hotel early so I could go watch the other two teams in our group the Rockford Sirens and Eclipse Select. As I looked at my map I remembered that the maps the tournament gives us would be better if 3rd graders did them. Most tournament maps say that they are not to scale, but these maps are ridiculous. One inch can mean either 1 mile or 15 miles. We are at the check in hotel and it is 30 minutes to the fields.

The Sirens vs Eclipse game was controlled by the Sirens. They have a very, very good sweeper and some fast wingers who are able to cross the ball in with great accuracy. They scored 2 great goals in the first half from this. We will have to watch their wingers and be facing up field to deal with the crosses as they come into our box.

After the first half of the Sirens game I went to help Mark with our U11 Blue team. They played a pretty good team from Nebraska who had a very good center mid. They prevailed in the end 4-0. Good start to the tournament for us. Then our U11 White team played a Sirens team and they ended up winning 4-1. A very good start to the tournament for us. After having the U12’s watch parts of these games we left to go to our field and get ready for our game against the kickers.

We are starting to change our mentality in warm ups with this team. In the past we have allowed them to mess around a bit and their focus would come in and out resulting in some good warm ups and some very sub par warm ups. Starting today I stressed that the second we say that we are going to get ready to play there is a switch in their heads that turns on and blocks everything out that has nothing to do with how we are going to play. There is only talk about how we are going to play in the formation that we are starting in and how we are going to adapt. The girls talk a lot about the “Ifs.” “If this happens we need to do this to react to this.” “If we can do this we will be successful.” It seemed to work well and our warm up was pretty sharp with no distractions.

We were going to start out in a 4-4-2 and hopefully get our defenders working well enough so we could switch to a 4-3-3. The idea was to give our defenders a little extra help by having 4 midfielders until I was satisfied with our defenders being able to shift quickly and fill the right gaps. I wanted to be able to get to 3 forwards because we have done a lot of work on using a 3 forward system and I love the chances that playing with 3 forwards creates for us on quick counter attacks. But even though we were only starting with two forwards I feel that we have two very good forwards, Maddie B and Jordy, who can cause tons of problems all by themselves, so I figured we would still be able to create chances with two forwards.

3 minutes into the game problems were created for the Kickers by Maddie B racing down the field with the ball, on the verge of being out of control with her legs moving at such a speed that it looks like her head and upper body are struggling to keep up with the speed of her legs. As she flew down the wing she crossed the ball into Jordy who got a quick touch and a shot that was blocked. But the rebound came right to Gaffer and she slotted the ball into the net for a 1-0 lead.

Great warm up= Great start.

Eight minutes later Maddie B zipped down to the endline where she stopped the ball and continued three yards out of bounds. The defender who was chasing her picked up the ball and looked to clear it. But just as she was about to kick it, Maddie B had come back onto the field and partially blocked the clearance and it went straight to Gaffer. Gaffer took a great first touch, looked up and laced the ball into the far upper corner for her second goal in 8 minutes.

We spent the rest of the first half trying to get our outside backs used to getting up the field when the ball is on their side of the field. We want them to act as outside midfielders and get forward every chance they can when the ball is on their side of the field. As this happens we want our other 3 defenders to be shifting over to cover for her and play as if we only have 3 defenders. While we haven’t grasped the concept of how and when to go forward with our outside backs, the other 3 defenders were doing a great job of getting over to cover for her.

The only chance that Chicago had was on a corner kick that they laced to the near post and Kari who was on the post jumped up and headed the ball clear. Great play by Kari.

At half time we talked about switching to our 4-3-3 and how important it was that our defenders shift quickly because we don’t have outside mids in this formation. We also stressed the importance that our 3 center mids need to always be aware of where each other are so we can keep balanced.

The points that we covered from the first half were:

-Communication. We were doing a decent job of talking, but it was too quiet. People were giving good information, but a lot of the team was unable to hear them.

-Facing up field on defense as much as possible. Beat your girl to where she wants to get to so you don’t end up chasing her to our goal.

-Continue to win the ball with hard tackles.

The second half began pretty well for us in our new formation. Our 3 center mids: Maddie V, Bella, and LK did a good job of making sure that one of them was always central. We were able to keep the ball in their end for most of the half with the pressure that our forwards were putting on their defenders. The couple of times that they actually did get the ball down to our half we were able to counter with great pace. In the 12^th minute Ricky won the ball in our half and played a great ball down the line to our center forward Jordy, who had made a great diagonal run to the line when she saw that Ricky was going to win the ball. Proactive running. Jordy blew by their last defender and went in on a breakaway and she shot high, going for the upper corner. The goalie made a great save on it, but Mack, our far forward, had worked hard to join up with Jordy on her break away and her long run was rewarded when she volleyed the rebound into the back of the net for a 3-0 lead.

We were able to keep Chicago away from our net and in the end we only gave up 2 shots and 2 corners for the entire game. A great defensive effort led by our goalie AJ who organized our defense and kept all the girls properly marked up.

Up next for the girls, shopping. They told me that this was a very important shopping weekend since school starts up on Tuesday. I reminded them that they were only 11 and 12 years old but that just drew some looks that informed me that it doesn’t matter how old a girl is. Clothes are important.

We have Eclipse tomorrow morning and Sirens tomorrow night. Good start, hopefully we’ll keep it going.