JFG No Go- Toe Bash Steps In

  My initial plan for the U13's was to form 2 pool teams and take them to the Just For Girls event in Des Moines September 20-21 along with our U12 White team.  (We had a free entry into the tournament with U12's since we had won the event last fall, so that was nice.)  I had talked with their tournament director over the phone and told him that since we would just be finishing tryouts when the application was due so I could get him the forms ahead of time but I'd prefer to wait until after I had our teams set.  The director said that this would be no problem and that he would pencil us in for 2 teams at the U13 age group and 1 team at the U12 age group.

About three weeks ago I got a call from the director that started like this:

Director: I think I screwed up.

Me in my head: Oh crap, this can't be good.

Director: I forgot that you had 2 teams coming down to the event and I only put 1 in the system at U13.   Is this going to be a big issue for you guys?

Me: Yep, we are still pooling our teams at that point and need both the U13 teams to be at the same event so I can watch them both.

Director: That stinks.

Yep it did.  I thanked him for calling me and we both looked at a number of different ways to make it work, but with the field shortages in the area due to last summer's floods it didn't look likely that we would be able to go to the tournament any more. 

After I hung up I immediately began searching for a tournament on the same weekend that could still take our 2 U13 teams and our U12 team on such short notice.  I wanted to keep the same weekend because everyone had already made plans to travel on that weekend, but at the same time I didn't want to have to drive over 5 hours for this event.  I found that those restrictions really limited my choices but I did find one in Madison and I immediately called the tournament director to see if they still had space for all of our teams.  To my surprise he did, even though they had stopped accepting registrations.  Whew.

I called the JFG Director and told him that we had found another tournament and he apologized again for the mix up.  He was a nice guy.

Training 9/14- First Touch Check

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.- George Lois

Another beautiful day out in the rain today.  The first session with my U12's was luckily dry and as I looked to the sky I was hoping my luck would hold out for the 3 scrimmages I had scheduled for our U9 Boys, U10 Boys and U11 Girls would hold up.  Just as I was thinking that the carry over of Hurricane Ike hit us.  

I wondered how my U9 Boys would react to this poor weather since they were young, but when I looked over at them they were already sliding around on the wet grass exclaiming how lucky they were to get to play in such great slide tackling weather.  The boys then went on to almost outscore the Vikings and Colts game that ended somewhere around 15-12 in their game against our North boys.  Lots of offense on display:)

Part way through the third scrimmage our U10 coach called me and told me that he was canceling their training session which was scheduled for the same time as the U13's session.  I thought that this might not be a bad idea after spending all afternoon yesterday out in the rain and all day today out in it as well, but then I remembered that as a player I would have been upset if my coach had cancelled training due to a little rain, along with the fact that they hadn't spent the day outside, so we went ahead with training.

As I drove over to McMurray the rain stopped, for the most part, and we were able to have a semi dry session:)  Thank goodness. 

I wanted to get the girls moving right away since it was a little cold and wet so we started off with a game of Bulldog.  This game is similar to knockout but I had the girls divided up into 4 teams.  3 teams were on the inside of the grid and all of those players had a soccer ball and they were working together. 1 team was the bulldogs who started on the outside of the grid.

When I said go 2 bulldogs from the team on the outside would enter the grid and try to knock out all the balls.  Every 15 seconds I released 2 more bulldogs into the grid until all the bulldogs were in the grid.

The players on the inside protected their ball from getting kicked out by a bulldog, but once their ball was kicked out they helped the other players keep their ball inside the grid.  

When all the balls were knocked out I stopped the clock.  The bulldog team with the lowest time won.

After a couple games of Bulldog we went to our partner juggling.  Today we had 12 groups get to double digits and a couple of groups were able to get 16. 

I had decided to play a possession game with the girls today to see how our first touch was coming along. 

9v4 Keep Away, 5 Passes= 1 point

-I divided the girls up into two teams of 9 and one team of 10 players

-I had two grids set up

-1 team split their team in half and they were the defenders in each of the two grids

-We played for 2 minutes and every time that the attacking team was able to put 5 consecutive passes in a row together they received a point.

-After 2 minutes we combined the score from both grids to get the defending team's score and then switched the defending team

-The team with the lowest score wins

We had some success at the game, but not as much as I had hoped, but that was ok because I wanted the girls to understand that we needed to continue to work on our first touch.  The space was pretty tight so every time a player received the ball a defender was close to them.  A poor first touch would almost always lead to a take away.  

After the keep away we played our 7v7 games and the lights stayed on the entire time tonight!