Soccer-Palooza!

     The Legends fall season kicked-off Saturday with games for Girl Power and the U10 Boys, both great games.  The Girl Power squad found themselves facing a much younger team who were clearly in the wrong division.  It was a very lopsided game with our girls scoring easily from the start.  I took a moment as I was leaving to stop and talk to some of the parents on the other team to be sure they understood that our two teams meeting was clearly a schedule mistake.  The other coach was doing a great job of maintaining the proper attitude and her team played fairly energetically throughout but you could see that a few of them were very inexperienced.  Well, you've got to start somewhere.  Our girls did very well in taking the game as an opportunity to sharpen their skills by attempting all of the dribbling moves.  They were generally very gracious too.
     The U10 Boys had a great game in their opener even though they took a loss.  Afterwards I described the game to a parent as a typical Legends team loss: we possess the ball more than the other team but get beat on counter attacks.  Given the way we are training our players that is to be expected.  We insist on ball control and stubborn ball possession and all of our coaches try to discourage players from defending by wildly kicking the ball.  We don't call for clearing kicks or teach our players to boot the ball out of bounds.  Everyone on the field has the same job wherever they are: have a soft touch on the ball, use your moves to get into space and head toward the goal.  The expert practitioner of that philosophy in this game was Oliver who played brilliantly from start to finish.  I think the other team had five goals but they'd have had at least three more if not for Oliver's determined work in our half of the field.  Most impressive was Ollie's ability to carry the ball backwards toward our own goal and then make a smart turn, leaving the pursuing opposition behind.  He easily put in the most yards run by any player in that game.
   
     We capped off the day by heading up to Columbus for a Crew game and our players got to take the field before kick-off.  It was excellent!  The kids all began commenting right away about how perfect the field was and they couldn't wait to play.  There was another club using the other half of the field and their kids looked a bit tentative about actually kicking a ball around and playing in such a big, unfamiliar space.  Not our Legends!  They knew exactly what to do: put the ball on the ground and play.  We only had the field for about 15 minutes but I think they all worked up a good sweat and showed off some fabulous skill!  What a blast!