Naming The Teams

Coming soon. . .

U13 Tryouts- Bringing It All Together

U13 is the year when we bring all of our Academies together to form our 2 Elite teams for the new year.  Last year we had 3 teams at this age group in the East and South Academy and we were expecting a number of girls from outside the academy to be trying out as well.  

Over the last month I had told all the girls and parents on my team that they should tryout for our club and another club so they would have different options to choose from.  A lot of coaches and clubs rarely tell all of their players to take a look at other clubs, some will tell players who may not make the team to look elsewhere, but I want people to choose to stay with us because they are informed about all their options and believe that we are the best fit for them.   

I know a number of girls were offered spots on teams one or two years up and they turned them down.  It was kind of funny to hear that coaches had been telling them about the benefits of playing up when they were trying to recruit them and they answered back with the fact that they were on the team that won State Cup an age group up.

I have been telling people that I have been excited about this age group for two years now and I am honored that I get to coach them.  It is a great age group in the State with a lot of talented players.  At the end of the tryouts we selected 34 girls to be a part of the Elite program which we will pool train for the first month and a half of the fall season until we form our Blue and White teams.  Along with the two Elite teams, we will also have 2-3 teams in our West Academy.

I was very happy to see that all of the girls from my team last year were selected to be in the Elite pool group and all of them accepted spots in the group.  

13+2+6=21 . . . Not 18?

For the second year in a row I will be taking the East U12 girls group on.  Tryouts are the most "Terribly Exciting" time of the year.  All kinds of emotions get brought out in this time from the tough choices of who should make which team to the excitement of looking at your new team.  The U12 age group is the best tryout age for us over the last two years because at this age group we expand our roster from 14 players to 18 players.  (Typically we're going from 11 or 12 players to 17)  The last two years have been nice because we were able to keep everyone from the previous years U11 team while being able to add in new players.  We were looking to do the same this year, but we thought we might have some conflicts since we had 13 players on our Blue team, 2 players on our mixed U10/U11 White team who wanted to stay with the program, and 6 players from outside the club that we wanted to add.

13+2+6=21

Darn.  That is 3 more spots than we had to give out. 

Before we came upon tryouts we had one of our players from last year's Blue team inform us that she would not be able to make the time commitment to Bangu for next year and she was going to play on a team that did not do as much training in the winter months.  While we hated to see her go and really wanted to make things work, we realize that

A)Not everyone wants to play soccer all year round.  

B) Not everyone is able to go from basketball to soccer, do homework, worry about other siblings events and have family time.

 We hope that she will be able to join back up with us at a future time and we wish her the best of luck for the coming year on her new team.

That brought us down to 20 players. 

It became 19 shortly after we could not reach one of our players via phone or email and tryouts had passed.  (Thankfully we were able to reach her after tryouts and work it out where she can play on our U13 White team and guest play with us.  We are very happy to be able to keep her involved.)

Now we were down to 1 spot too many.  This was manageable.  We thought of a couple creative solutions to the problem, but before we had to try any of them out we got an email saying that another one of our players was going to go back to her community program for the coming year.  Too bad again.  A player we really liked, but it was not going to work out for her this year with us.  Best of luck to her.

Just like that we've got our team.  18 players.  A full roster.  Not ideal, but not a bad problem to have as I would find out sooner than I wanted too.