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.