Nomads Day 2: Team Surfing Lessons and Training

Still Coming . . .

Nomads Day 1: Flight and Surfing

It is great having roommates who travel and need rides to the airport occasionally.  It is especially great if you have picked them up from their last flight and they owe you a ride at 6am.  

After a long day of flying I made it into San Diego at 3pm.  Perfect timing for my 4:30 surfing lesson.  I boarded the bus for National Rent A Car and as we approached their facility our driver, Steve, informed us that the first stop would be for members of the Emerald Club.  The second stop would be for everyone else.  As I looked at the other 2 passengers on the bus, one had a smirk on his face knowing that he was in the Emerald Club.  The other passenger and I would have to wait for the 2nd stop.  

As we pulled up to the Emerald stop and our royalty passenger exited I started laughing because our stop was a mere 10 yards up ahead.  I wonder how much he paid to get into that club?  I then found out after he had issues with his car and was in line behind me complaining about it.  

I got into my car and 2 wrong turns and 10 minutes later I was at the hotel.  I threw my stuff in my room and left to go meet my surf instructor Souf from the San Diego Surfing School.   I found out that Souf had moved here from Hawaii 10 years ago and shortly after that he founded San Diego Surfing School.  This year they have partnered with the city of San Diego and he was really excited about the upcoming year for them.

The reason why I was able to go out surfing today was that Kenny Culotta had helped to set up surfing lesson for girls tomorrow.  I had mentioned that I would love to go out today and Souf made it happen.  

I wanted to take the girls surfing on our trip because I had done a group surfing lesson a couple of years ago when I was out at this tournament and it is probably the most memorable experience I've had in soccer.  It is something that is very unique for kids from Minnesota to do and I was excited that we were going to be able to surf.  

It turned out to be a very good thing that I went out with Souf today because I was horrible. I resembled nothing close to the picture from above.  Souf did a fantastic job explaining everything to me, showing me, and helping push me into great waves.  But once he let go and I was on my own, gravity usually won out in a matter of .58 seconds.  

Being a coach, it was super frustrating to hear Souf explain it to me so well and completely fail each time.  But I loved it.  I kept getting back up and eventually I started to catch a few waves and ride them in.  I think I caught about 7 waves in my 90 minutes out there.  With all the practice today, I might look somewhat respectable tomorrow if I can move.  Surfing is an incredible work out!

When Souf said that the next wave was going to be my last wave I relaxed and actually caught the wave.  I was pretty proud of myself.  

I'm looking forward to tomorrow.  I'll recap the surfing and I'll even preview the tournament and who we are playing.

San Diego for Nomads Because Neusport FC Continues To Ruin The LVCS

We fly out tomorrow to San Diego to participate in the Nomads Coaches Showcase.  San Diego is one of my favorite places in the entire world so I am excited to go out there.  It is supposed to be mid 60's-70's and sunny the entire time we are there.  Here in Minnesota we just had another bout of snow/sleet/rain and sub zero temperatures.  I will be leaving at 9:00 tomorrow morning and I have a surfing lesson set up for tomorrow evening.

Our original plan for this weekend had us going to Las Vegas with our U15's, U16's, and U18's.  We had major problems with this tournament last year with our current 15's and 16's.  

First they put the 15's into the 2nd division of the tournament.  The 15's were the Region II Champs, there was no way they belonged in the 2nd flight.  After much work, they were finally moved into the top bracket.  

The next issue was that hotels had doubled in price from the year before and the tournament was pocketing a ton of extra money.  They were also selling vouchers for food at some of the hotels, that were more expensive than the food at the hotels actually were, and the hotels didn't know anything about the vouchers.

Then, on the first day of the tournament, we were warming up with the current 16's and we kept looking over to the field next to ours where the other two teams in our group were supposed to play.  As we looked over, we saw referees and one team warming up.  Where was the other team?  The other team was supposed to be the Region IV ODP team, but they had pulled out of the tournament well over a month before because all of their players were competing with their club teams in the tournament.  The officials at Neusport had decided not to tell anyone about this.  Not even the refs or the field marshals.  Then, as usual, they would not answer their phones.

We played our game, but the other team in our group did not get a game.  Us and the other 2 teams in our group were furious about this but the tournament would not respond to anything.  Finally on the morning when we were supposed to play the ODP team, they called us and said that we would not have a game.  

Add in the fact that they did not have the goals up and ready at the start of the tournament for the the 15's and there were no corner flags at our complex, this was the worst run tournament I had ever been a part of.

I completed our registration for the tournament last fall and I began sending the tournament emails in November to see if we had been accepted to the tournament.  By December I had heard nothing back from them so I began to call and leave messages.  Our 14's were doing the same thing and we figured between both of our teams that one of us would get a response.

January came and we still had not heard from the tournament.  Then one day they switched the tournament's front page from U13-U18 Showcase to U15-U18.  What the heck?!  I had been hearing rumors that the entire tournament was going to be cancelled do to law suites and I wanted to get in on one of those.  I wanted to file our complaints along with everyone else.   

When all this came about I tried to see if we could get into the Jefferson Cup and one other tournament, but after checking into them, I found that too many of our girls would not have been able to go on any other weekend.  

Then about a month ago I was in contact with Nomads and they said that they could use one more U13 team.  I checked it out with the parents and we had enough players to go so we booked the trip.  We will be in the same tournament as our 13 Whites and we are staying at the same hotel as the 14 Blues so it will be a fun tournament.

*Vegas once again screwed our 15's by placing them in the 2nd bracket and the 16's play 2 of the same teams that they played last year.  It would be great if that tournament could get their act together because it used to be one of the best tournaments in the nation.

St Cloud Friendlies Game #1 vs Mequon

I arrived up in St Cloud last night so I would be able to be at the dome at 7:00am to set up the Hi-Pod for the day's games.  Jim Niemann was meeting me there with one of his U18 players and we were using the Hi-Pod as a fundraiser for their team.  

The first game was at 7:30 so we had plenty of time to set up the Hi-Pod but as we started to set it up, everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.  First the monitor where you watch what is being filmed would not turn on.  We spent 15 minutes working on that until we decided it was officially broken.  Luckily Jim had a monitor from his car that they use to watch dvd's on that looked like it might work, but in order for that to happen Jim had to make a trip to Walmart to get a converter.  20 minutes later Jim was back with the pieces.  Another 15 minutes with electrical tape, extension cords, and the converter we were ready to go with the monitor.

We sent the camera up only to find that Jim's HD camera's remote was not working.  Of course everything had worked on Wednesday and Thursday when we checked over everything, but come crunch time all we were missing was circus music to go with our side line spectacle.

Down came the camera.  We moved the Hi Pod closer to the middle of the field.  Adjusted the zoom and sent the camera back up.  We didn't like the zoom, again, so we brought the camera back down.  Adjusted the zoom and 10 minutes into the 2nd game of the day we were good to go.  

I had originally planned on going home after the Hi-Pod was set up and running but the 14 Blues were playing in that 2nd game so I stayed to watch them play.  Each time I watch them I am amazed at how much they have improved.  They are so much more dangerous this year.  I think they put up 9 goals on Dakota Gold's 15 team.

Shortly after that the 15 Whites were playing, so I stayed and watched that.  This happened over and over again so I ended up staying at the dome the entire day.

I was able to watch the 13 Whites play Mequon.  The game went back and forth and the White team was able to score once and win 1-0.  When Mequon was in control of the game they sent numbers forward and played decent.  But when the White team was in control they kept almost everybody back to defend.

At 6:45pm it was finally our turn to play.  For today's game we would be without Stoker and Bella and we had Babo from Mark's 12's playing up with us.  

We started out in our 4-3-3.  Right from the opening whistle we showed tons of skill on the ball.  The girls did lots of moves.  We knocked the ball around very nicely with lots of combinations.  The only issue was that we did all of this in our half with out looking to go forward.  

Each time the girls received the ball they would try to beat a defender no matter where they were or how many people were around them.  We were very calm on the ball.  During the game we had a couple of spells where we played keep away in our box with our defenders and AJ against their forwards.  Each time the ball went to AJ and she waited to draw their forwards in I was screaming inside my head for her to play it.  But each time she would release the ball at the last second to one of our defenders and we kept possession of the ball.  

It was cool to see how confident the girls were on the ball, but we definitely needed to address whether or not we had a purpose for the skill we were showing.  At half time, this was all we talked about.  We needed to get the ball into our attacking half.  That way we would be using our skill to create scoring chances as opposed to using our skill to show that we had skill.  

I encouraged our defenders to find our forwards feet as quickly as possible each time they received the ball.  This would become our main focus for the weekend.  Playing 25-40 yard passes to our forwards feet.  I didn't want them to simply get the ball and send it long.  I wanted them to play feet.  It would be a challenge for our forwards to find the passing lanes and for our defenders to get their heads up early enough to find them.  

The second half we did a much better job of getting the ball to our forwards and we played the entire second half in Mequon's end.  But, we found it really difficult to create a lot of quality scoring chances since Mequon kept 10-11 players behind the ball.  We have done almost all of our training this winter dealing with transition play, so facing a situation where there was no transition(due to us having the ball almost the entire game) we were a bit lost.

Our formation also did not help because without wide players up in the attack we were not able to get around the outside of Mequon to cross the ball and create chances that way.  

In the end we were able to create a couple of chances but nothing went in and the game ended tied 0-0.  Disappointing result?  Not really.  This was our 4th game since the beginning of December and we showed tons of skill on the ball while being under pressure.  Had we scored a goal or two nothing would have changed.  We still would have needed to recognize how to use our skill to be creative and we still would need to move the ball up field quicker.  We talked briefly after the game and I would address it more tomorrow with the girls about what creativity really is.

I am fairly confident as well that tomorrow we would be a different team. The game against the 14's will see us improve a lot based on how we improved in our last set of back to back games in November.  Plus, the girls pick up ideas very quickly.  Another thing that will be in our favor with tomorrow's game, is that it will be a lot more wide open and we will be able to use our transition game to our advantage.  I am looking forward to it.

St Cloud Friendlies

Holy cow!  Can you believe all the posts?!  I am finally all caught up.  We will see how long this will last with all the stuff coming up:)

This weekend we finally will start playing games again when we travel up to St Cloud for the MTA Friendlies.  We have 1 game on Saturday vs Mequon's U13's.  I've never seen this team but they should be competitive if you go off of their scores from the SC Del Sol Tournament over President's day.  They lost all three of their round robin games 0-2 but they played two very good teams in FC Select, who we tied 0-0 last fall, and Neusport FC.  I've said it before that I think Neusport is one of the top teams in the country, so to stay within 2 goals of them is pretty good.  They finished that tournament beating Bethesda's 2nd team 1-0.  

We have two games on Sunday.  The first game on Sunday is vs the 14 Blues.  I am really excited for this game to see if we have continued to progress as the 14's are the team that we have been able to play throughout the winter and we can judge our progress based on our games with them.  

Our final game is against Dakota Rev's U13's.  This should also be a fun game.