Fall Soccer 2010

This year we have 3 kids playing soccer so we've been super busy with practices and games. With MJ being so young still and Kay being quite a handful we ended up doing a lot of tag-team parenting on game days. Sometimes I would go to a game with just MJ while DH stayed home with the other kids or I would stay home and DH would go alone or with one or two of the older kids. Blondie had quite a few early morning games so we would leave M&M home with the other kids and just take MJ to the game with us. It is nice having M&M old enough to babysit now!

This was Blondie's first year playing and she enjoyed a lot more than I thought she would. We put her on an all-girl team and she loved it. Unfortunately she has a coach who seems a little too busy and distracted to be an effective coach for this age. Just about every other practice was canceled for one reason or another and the girls had no idea what they were doing in the games. At first it was kind of funny to watch the girls try and figure out the games, but by the end of the season it was more frustrating than anything else. They ended the fall season with a 3-3-2 record, but I don't think Blondie really learned anything during the whole season...
Luke also had a pretty frustrating season. Since I wasn't able to coach this year, we just turned in the registration form with a couple of his teammates from last year and they were placed on a team. Unfortunately I wasn't able to observe any of the practices during the season, but the coach had an interesting style that we are still trying to figure out. It seemed like his main goal was to win and he did everything he could to make that happen - but I think most of it backfired. He had the best players on the team playing forward during the games which left all of the weak players for the defense positions. He also would only let his own son play goalie even though his son was not very good at it and he didn't enjoy playing it - AND one of the players from my team last year is an excellent goalie and loves playing the position. This boy was always asking to play goalie and the coach just wouldn't let him - until the end of the last game of the season and he did an awesome job and kept the team from losing by much more than they already were. There was also another kid from my team last year that played goalie occasionally and was pretty good - at least better than the coach's son... Luke's team ended up with a losing record overall (3-5) and it was pretty frustrating for the boys from my team last year. I don't think that any of them will choose to play for this coach next time if they continue to play after the spring season.
M&M by far had the best coach out of the three this year. When we registered her for soccer in the spring, she had two choices of teams to sign up with and she was really torn on which to pick. The coach she played for last year decided at the last minute to coach again (and he lives just a couple of doors from us and was just released from our ward bishopric - a super nice, but also super busy guy). The other team is one that is mostly from her school and they practice much closer to our house and a good friend of hers from the ward plays on the team. The coach is the husband of one of M&M's 3rd grade teachers. I told M&M that we would leave the decision up to her because she is the one that would be playing for the team and she couldn't go wrong with either of the teams. M&M finally decided to try out the closer team with her friend on it. This team has been playing together for many years and the only reason we didn't put M&M on the team last year was because they were playing the division older than M&M. The first few weeks of the season M&M was afraid that she had made the wrong decision and she wasn't really enjoying the team yet - the practices were much harder than she was used to and a lot of the kids are a year older than her. By the end of the season, M&M was absolutely loving the team and loving playing soccer. Her team ended the season undefeated and we were very impressed with the team as a whole and how the coach coached them. They had a couple of close games and they were pretty intense to watch. The team was really good with passing and the kids all played really well together. The league this year ended up hiring some high school players to ref the games which worked out very nicely on the whole. We just had to pay a few extra dollars per player which I think was totally worth it. The coach seemed impressed with M&M and how aggressive she was especially since she is quite a bit smaller than some of the other players at this age. She is also one of only 2 girls on the team.

M&M was actually pretty upset after the last soccer game of the season because she was really close to scoring a goal several times and just couldn't manage to get the ball in the goal. The coach really liked putting her in at center forward for some reason - I think he liked how she always ran towards the goal when a shot was taken in case it bounced out of the goalie's hands. M&M's team played her team from last year and a couple of the players jokingly called her a traitor, but I think she made a good choice to switch teams. She has definitely learned a lot this fall season and is looking forward to playing for this coach again in the spring.