Scrimmage vs U12 South Boys and U12 Girls

Today we were supposed to have our club night at the Thunder game so instead of training we decided to have a couple of scrimmages before the Thunder game out in Blaine.  I divided the girls up into 2 different teams than what we had over Labor Day and one team played the U12 Girls inside the stadium with Cook and Chad as coaches, how cool for them?, and the I had the other team out on the exhibition field versus the U12 South Boys. 

I was looking forward to playing against the South Boys because they are a very quick and skilled team.  Over Labor Day they were finalist at the NSR Cup in Naperville, IL against some very good competition.

The weather was terrible at best with driving wind, rain and cold weather.  The kids would have to be tougher than me to play as I was dressed in my winter coat and hat using an umbrella to combat the elements.  

The game against the U12 girls went ok from what I heard with the U12's getting on the board in the first couple of minutes to put us under pressure.  The game was tied 1-1 at half time but it finished 4 or 5 to 1 at the end.

The game that I coached against the boys was pretty good despite the conditions and the boys put together some good combinations but our size and speed allowed us to catch up to them every time they broke us down.  We scored the first goal of the game When Taz tracked down a through ball and played the ball back to AJ in goal who then moved the ball out wide to Hannah, our other central defender and we proceeded to string 8 passes in a row that covered the entire field and finished with Sizzle finishing on a one touch shot.

Sizzle's shot just slipped under the goalie to go in so it was nice to see that all the passing had materialized into a goal for the girls to look back on.  It was our best ball movement of the day and a lot of fun to watch.  The part that I liked the most was when Kari (LF) realized that we didn't have a good chance to go forward down her side she turned out of trouble like we had been working on in training and we proceeded to switch the ball.

We scored our second goal of the game in the second half off of a Blitz corner that Mack poked home when their was a miscommunication between their goalie and defender.

The boys had a couple of chances but they kept shooting right at AJ who did not give up any rebounds and she kept a clean sheet.

As we were shaking hands with the boys AJ told Mark Yuiell that she wanted to do a shoot out so we went ahead and did one.  It would be good training for the girls who were not on our team last year to get the mind set that I want them to have with shoot outs.  By this point we had played much longer halves than the group in the stadium had so we actually had a decent size crowd to watch the shoot out. 

It was an exciting shoot out that went 10 shooters with Kari scoring our final goal and AJ making the last save for us to win 6-5.

We had planned to grill out and go to the Thunder game after our scrimmages but everyone was soaked and cold so we decided to scrap the bbq for another day.  

The weather for the game actually ended up to be pretty nice and the Thunder won 4-0.

9/9 Training- Changing The Point Of Attack While Keeping The Ball

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or to lose.- Lyndon B Johnson

Our juggling has continued to improve and the girls are excited about it which makes it even better.  2 weeks ago when we started the partner juggling with feet only we had 3 groups get 6 juggles back and forth and that was our high score.  (Part of this could be because I did not let the top couple of jugglers work together)  At todays training we had 6 groups get into double digits and 2 groups were able to get all the way up to 16 juggles back and forth.  

(Back and forth means that if I start with the ball I am 1, then my partner is 2, and back to me is 3.  It does not matter how many juggles I take, but they all have to be with my feet.  I encourage the girls to take at least 2 juggles each time they get the ball.)

After our technical work we played 5v5 to 2 goals to continue working on keeping possession of the ball while changing the point of attack.

The big challenge is to get the girls not to panic when the way that they are going is closed down.  I kept stressing to the girls to use their footskills and creativity to get themselves out of trouble.

We switched teams a couple of times and played the game for about 30 minutes.

The last 20 minutes we played our 7v7 scrimmages.

9/7 Training

Actions have consequences...first rule of life. And the second rule is this - you are the only one responsible for your own actions. - Holly Lisle

Today was the first day that the Jonathon Schaefer was able to make it out to training with the girls.  It is great to have him on staff but he has been busy with his men's college team at Augsberg which has prevented him from working with us so far this fall.  It is great for me that all of the other coaches who are working with the girls are very good at goal keeper training so our keepers will get a ton of specialized work in this year.  

For the first 30 minutes of training today I worked on our juggling and footskills with the field players and Schaefer took the goalies and did work with them.

After the technical work we went to our 3v3 game that we did yesterday but we went to big goals today and added in the goalies.  The idea that we started to work with the girls on today was to look to score quickly but to make sure that your group of 3 had some balance.

After the 3v3 we started to play our 7v7 scrimmages but with about 10 minutes left in our training the lights went out.  Without missing a beat the girls kept playing and we played the last 10 minutes in the dark.  The girls had a great time and did a good job of dealing with a little adversity just like the football game yesterday.