Week One

Day Two... We shifted practice to our new field next to our school. The grass just got planted in early August and although it has grown in 90-ish %, it is not full and vibrant. Our original plan was to keep everyone off it for the fall to give it a chance to grow, but recess for our elementary grades did not go well on the concrete, so they have been using it for a week now. That, plus our run ins with the locals on Monday, lead us to give our field a try. It is nice to have a fenced in yard, but the wear and tear we will inevitably create worries me a little.

We now have 10 players aboard, two 8th graders from last year's squad, and two more 8th graders. We should pick up a few more before the week is over.

Day Three... Picked up one more player to make 11 on the roster.

Day Four... Rain. Picked up one more player. Stayed inside for an hour and watched instructional video.

Starting out much slower this year than last year. There are still a few more kids to hit up about joining the team. We have two weeks left of practice before our first game and we have a lot of ground to cover to be ready for a game. Hopefully, we can build some momentum or excitement next week.

Day One

I tried to start practice last week by inviting our returning core players to a practice to get our main players going- but only one kids showed up, so I postponed practice until today. That way I had three school days to recruit interested kids for the team.

My efforts yielded 6 players (5 plus one girl who had to wait for her brother on the team to get picked up, so I convinced her to come to practice). There are several more kids who played last year and several others interested that did not show up (including the one player to have all her papers and athletic fee in).

The first exciting thing happened on the way to the park- which is only about three blocks north and 2 blocks west of our school. We sort of weaved our way through the neighborhood to the park and as we passed through a rather busy block, several young people were hanging out on a porch looking intently at us. I figured it was because we were walking through the block in cleats and with a huge bag of soccer balls, but as we passed directly in front of their porch I quickly learned it was because they were waiting to bombard us with water balloons! I was pretty proud of our 6 players as they chose not to respond in any way- probably because only a couple of the balloons hit their intended targets. (It was a little like being Luke Skywalker and being shot at by imperial storm troopers.)

Once we got to the park we had a few kids stop and watch our practice, but no one threw anything at us. Our first practice was pretty low key, stretching, learning some basic touch drills and passing and dribbling. Of our six current players I was excited that 2 were 6th graders and 2 were girls. Though we did not get into anything complex today, I was encouraged that our few players caught on to the drills pretty quickly.

The other "exciting" thing that happened to us was on the way back to the school. Walking through the neighborhood again, we took a different route to avoid the water balloon gauntlet, but we passed several young boys playing basketball who felt the need to shout at our girls. We kept on walking (even though our 8th grade girls wanted to go shut them up) and were surprised when these boys ran a block over and attempted to throw rocks at us through some trees. Immediately after throwing the rocks, the boys made like Carmelo Anthony in a fight and ran, ran, ran away.

This sort of underscores a need I have been praying about for a little while - a van or minibus. I knew that our new school's neighborhood was more "active" than our last, but I did not expect the "fireworks" we got today. If we had a 15 passenger van or mini-bus we could ride to practices (and games) without these kind of issues. Since our team will only get bigger and be adding more girls, I am a tad bit concerned with our having to walk to practice. There is at least one route we can take that sort of avoids the neighborhood.

None of the kids today had cleats, but I had 6 pairs collected and they actually all fit the kids. However, we are still in need of more cleats, shin guards and funds to screen print our jerseys (which currently have no team names or numbers on them) and buy some nets and flags for our "home" field.

One day down, several to go and looking forward to seeing what kind of team we will have this year.

GO TIGERS!