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.

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.

Are You Ready?! I Know I Am! Let's Hurry Up And Get Started.

I can't stand having time off.  For me a day off is only having to do stuff for the website during the day and coaching at night.  Every two months or so I will make myself take an entire day off where I can't coach or work on anything work related.  An entire day off with nothing to do usually leaves me in a state of confusion for the first half of the day.  The rest of the day is spent remembering how much I love coaching and how I want to do it all the time.  This is sufficient to refuel my drive for the next two to six months. 

Tryout time meant time off from coaching for me.  Just evaluations at night 4 nights of the week.  Too much time off.  So as soon as I had my team selected I set our schedule and got us started right away.  We are going to two tournaments this fall.

 NSR Gold Cup

August 31-September 3rd

Nike Classic Cup 

October 12-14

I was able to take last year's U12 age group to the NSR Cup and I left the tournament feeling that we could compete skill wise with the other teams, but we did not have the same amount of experience on the large field that the teams we were playing did.  This led me to the belief that I felt that we had not shown as well as we could have due to a lack of preparation on my part.  I was not going to make that same mistake again with this group so we hit the large field as soon and as often as we could. 

Starting on the 14th of August, just two days after tryouts, I scheduled 6 training sessions and scrimmages against the teams listed below in preparation for NSR.

U13 Bangu Blue (one and a half games)

U12 Bangu South (twice)

U13 TC Fire 

While we are still going in with less experience on the large field than the Chicago teams since they have been playing 11v11 since late July and early August, at least we have had some time getting used to the field and all the space out there.  It is quite funny watching them out there their first couple of times on the big field.  All that space and so many different ideas of where to be and what to be doing. 

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.