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!

Soccer Season...

will begin in...[click here]

LATE State Results

It was three weeks ago, but since we are headed to the Lutheran NATIONAL Grade School tournament, I thought I would finally get around to posting how the State tournament went.

***

Our first round opponent was a Missouri synod school from Wauwatosa who had beaten and been beaten by teams we had beaten this year. I got to see them play live once and felt that their size might push us a little, but our speed should wear them down.

The first quarter we played like a team that had not played a meaningful game in almost three weeks. Despite the nerves and sloppiness we were up 14-7 at the end of the 1Q. Our center picked up 2 fouls before the end of the quarter and sat the entire 2Q and our defense fell apart and our offense went AWOL as we limped into half time tied 19-19.

The third quarter saw our offense pick up the pace but so did our opponent's. As the quarter wound down, our shooting guard - who had missed his first 7 three point attempts - drilled a three to end the quarter and send us into the 4Q leading 32-38. From there we never looked back. It was as if we realized it was late in the game and we needed to get to work. We got 8 points a piece from both our best scorers (who both finished the game with 22pts a piece) and won the 4Q 23-4 on our way to a 54-32 victory.

***

Our second round opponent had played a tight first round game in a raucous environment - both they and their opponent brought huge (by middle school standards) student sections. Though not exceptionally big or fast, they played a good team game. They did not appear to have much for us to be worried about, and the game played out that way as well.

We played on the main court this round at Concordia University. It is a big transition to go from playing on middle school sized gyms (with an occassional high school gym) to playing on a collegiate sized floor. In this case it worked to our advantage.

We jumped out quickly to start the game, both our press and our shooting guard (9 points in the 1Q) were on fire and we lead 15-2 after the first six minutes. The second quarter was nothing like the first for us, however, as we saw a couple of our starters get into foul trouble and nothing go right offensively. We were able to hold them to 5 points and we only scored 2 to bring our lead to 17-7 at half time.

The 3Q we picked back up where we had left off in the first with our shooting guard replicating his 1Q of 9 pts. We won the quarter 16-7 and took a 33-14 lead into the final quarter. We scored the first few buckets to start the quarter and with about 4 minutes to go, their coach cleared his bench so we did likewise. We still won the quarter (9-5) on our way to a 42-19 victory and a spot in the State semi-finals.

***

Our semi-final opponent was a very familiar one. They were from our conference and we had played (and beaten) them in the semi-finals of the last two tournaments we played (and won). Our game would be a test of whether or not you can beat a good team four times in one season.

Of our previous three match-ups with this opponent, the first two were spirited contests and the third it just seemed that they had convinced themselves that they could not beat us. This game started out just like that. We jumped on them early and rolled to a 9-2 lead at the end of the 1Q. They settled down in the 2Q and we slowed down a little and also dealt with some early foul trouble. We lost the 2Q 10-8 but lead 17-12 heading into the break.

The 3Q was eerily similar to the first in that we did a lot right defensively and enough right offensively to win the quarter 9-2 and extend our lead to 26-14 with one quarter to play. Not much happened in the 4Q as it became apparent that our opponents had truly had enough of us. There was no late game rally, no extra fouling to extend the game, no urgency from either team as the clock slowly ticked away and saw us advance to the championship game with a 32-22 victory. Not very inspiring but we got the job done.

***

Our championship game opponent was a team we had played (and beat) very early in the season. Not only had we beat them, but we also had beat everyone else that had beat them. I liked our match-up with them. Even though they had several big guys, their guards were small and young (7th grade). In our first match-up with them they lead the entire first half, but we turned up the pressure in the 2H and ended up winning by four.

We started the game out like many of our games this year, getting both offensive looks that we wanted and defensive stops that we needed. The biggest surprise was our center scoring 6 first quarter points- the most he had scored all season in a first quarter. We lead 10-8 when the quarter ended, it should have been more but our shooting guard missed two free throws after being fouled while shooting as the clock expired. The second quarter was pretty typical for us, we lost a little steam offensively, got a little lazy defensively and saw our two point lead turn into a one point defecit by half-time, 18-17.

Despite the lackluster second quarter, we were in good shape. No one was in serious foul trouble, we just were not playing like we knew we could. The third quarter we had glimpses that we were ready to break out, but we were never able to get rolling like we often did during the season. We put up an 11 point quarter but gave up 13 points and found ourselves trailing 31-28 with one quarter to go.

The final quarter saw us struggle to stay within 6 points almost the entire time. The lead may have grown to 8pts but we never got within less than 4. It became apparent that nerves (or something) were hitting our boys big time as our execution was poorer than it had been in weeks. We had switched out of our zone press and defense to a man-to-man since the size of the floor (college regulation) made it too easy to find open guys and shots. But, our main players were either unwilling or unable to put much pressure on their assigned guys.

We managed to scrap our way to a three point deficit with just over twelve seconds left and our opponent on the line. He missed the first free throw and then the second and we got the rebound ready to call a time-out, but an official called a lane violation on us. Besides that, the clock operator ran a full second off the clock when no time should have expired. Even our opponent's coach agreed that time ran off, but the operator said he did not start the clock so the time stayed as is. Off course the shooter hit the second FT to move their lead to 4 with 11.something left.

We drew up a play for our best all-round player to dribble straight to the hoop and look for a lay-up, if guarded to kick out to our shooting guard for a 3pt try. Instead of flying up the floor with the ball, he inexplicably jogs the ball up the floor, dribbles a couple circles and then takes a poor 3pt attempt. He missed, we got the rebound, scored and called a time-out...but there was only .9 seconds left. We had used almost 11 seconds to score and now we were down by 2 with less than a second left.

We did our best to cover everyone in hopes of some crazy fluke where we could catch the inbound pass and shoot it all in one motion, but it was not to be as they inbounded and won the state championship 40-38.

A frustrating end to a great, great season. Two days later we received word that we had been accepted to the National Lutheran tournament in Valparaiso, Indiana. A chance to somewhat redeem an unfortunate end.

Championship Photos

At our last tournament, there was a photographer in attendance who takes photos for the local (Grafton) sports teams. He took 174 pictures at our game, including our team photo when it was all over.

Check out the photos [here].

27-5 with Another Championship!

Two weeks ago we were recovering from a disappointing and dysfunctional 3rd place finish in our conference tournament. Now our season has become a rare, incredibly rewarding and memorable one as we won our second straight large Lutheran school tournament.

Our semi-final opponent was a team from our conference that we had played already twice this season, most recently last week in the semi-finals of our Wisconsin Synod tournament. In both cases we played sluggish and got into unnecessary foul trouble but found a way to win by 3 and 1. This time around we were ready to show them once and for all that we were the better team. Our only concern was whether or not our 6'2" center would get home (from visiting his sister at college) in time to play our 1pm game. We got our answer at 12:15 when he called me to let me know he and his family were over an hour away from Milwaukee (plus the tournament was another 30 minutes away). In the locker room we talked about how this was a statement game- we needed to make a statement to our opponent that we were the better team by beating them 3 out of 3 tries and we needed to make a statement to ourselves that even without a key player we could all step up and play great basketball.

I told our guys to be ready for a team that would be hungry to finally beat us and who would come at us with something to prove- but it was clear from the earliest moments of this game that our opponent was not going to be that team. Maybe they had already decided that they could not beat us, maybe they had all stayed up too late the night before, or maybe it was something else but they did not come out with any fire against us.

The first quarter was slow and sluggish for both teams but we were on top 8-6 when it ended. The semi-final before us featured the host school vs. a team from Chicago. The officials had turned that game into a foul and FT fest that was so obnoxious that the home fans were even ripping into the refs (by name in many cases!), so we were a little concerned that our game would end up that way as well. Despite many baffling calls (and even more baffling explanations from the officials), we were never really knocked out of our game plan. The school's gym is smaller than official size, especially on the wings where a player with over a size 10 shoe cannot physically attempt a 3-pointer. The "smallness" of the court worked to our advantage with our press. We were the only team at the tournament who used a press in every game, all game long. We won the second quarter 7-4 to extend our lead to 15-10 at the break.

The third quarter was more of the same from the first half. We forced our opponent to play our game and converted our fast break opportunities to take the quarter 12-6 and take a 27-16 lead into the fourth quarter. It was evident by this time that we had this game under control as our opponent's best player had no energy left playing the entire quarter with his jersey untucked and no real confidence against our defense. We actually lost the quarter by 1 point but won the game 37-27. All of our guys were pretty excited to have definitively beat this team a third team to move on to another championship (thus securing our name in future tournament programs again) and to have done this without our center.

I had emailed the tournament director earlier this week to let her know that our center would not be playing Saturday (because of a family trip) but would be back Sunday. I just wanted to cover our bases since it would be obvious to all that he had not been there Saturday. As it turned out our opponent in the championship was the host school and their head coach told me at the start of the tournament that he was aware of our situation. So, even though our opponent's players (and parents) did not know he was coming- their coach did.

Last week's championship was huge for numerous reasons, this time around it was all about cementing a legacy (if there is such a thing in middle school) of greatness. There was no way I could replicate my pre-game speech from the previous week so instead I prepped the guys for a game with a loud crowd totally against them, officiating that would probably go against them all game, and a chance to demonstrate who we really were. The guys were ready to go, our only question was whether or not our center would be ready for a championship game (having not played the previous three).

The environment in the gym was great. Though the gym (built in 1961- the first year of the tournament- and filled to capacity) was probably over 90% for the home team, we had our largest crowd of fans for any of our four games this weekend, complete with a couple grandparents and parents who had yet to see their kids play this year. The first quarter went exactly how we wanted it to, fast paced and intense. Our press and 1-3-1 zone were doing enough to rattle their offensive plans and our shooting guard was "getting off" hitting all three of his 3-point attempts as we rolled to a 17-11 first quarter lead. It was evident that our center was not ready for this intense of a game after a "vacation" and his back-up was also not ready.

The second quarter we had a couple boys pick up their second fouls and found the bench since we were still ahead by 4-6 points the entire quarter. We lost a little bit of steam and had some crucial mental errors (and one bogus three point play against us) in the final minute that lead to a tie score (23-23) at the break. Our half time coaches' discussion was our longest of the season thanks to the host school's cheerleaders performing at half time (thus extending the normal 5 minute intermission to 10 minutes). We noticed that our opponent had figured out our 1-3-1, so we decided to switch to our 2-1-2 and keep the press going. Offensively, we were getting the shots we wanted- we just needed our bigs to "man" up and do their assigned jobs. All 23 of our points had come courtesy of our two leading scorers and it did not appear that they were going to have any trouble getting buckets in the second half, but they were going to need some help for us to win the game.

In the third quarter other guys started to contribute. Despite falling behind early (for the first and only time in the game), we kept our composure and went to work. Our center finally settled down and gave us the defensive effort we were missing (he finished the game with 6 blocks). Our scorers scored but we also got buckets from two other guys as well on our way to a 13-8 quarter victory and a 36-31 lead with 6 minutes to play.

The fourth quarter played out the way a fourth quarter of a championship should with the crowd into it and the players battling on every possession. Ultimately, the game was decided in the final 3 minutes. Our center denied several point blank shot attempts and scored two huge baskets (his only two of the game). We found ourselves up 6 when our shooting guard stole the ball at the top of the key and raced down the foul for a lay-up that would, for all intents and purposes, seal the win. But, instead of going right to the backboard he tried to make a high-light lay-up and missed. Thus, giving our opponent one last gasp to get the game down to two possesions or less. We harassed them enough on the ensuing possession to get a turn over and the ball out of bounds under our opponent's basket. They had only three fouls at this point in the second half and went into a full court press for the first time in the game. Our two best players were able to run off screens by our center, get the in bounds passes and literally dribble out the final minute and a half never even needing to shoot bonus free throws.

There was not much to say to the boys after the game, they were stoked to win another championship, giddy about the big individual medals everyone got, and even more excited that our name would be listed as 2009 CHAMPION for years to come in the program.

In my post game notes that I write down for every game, I was hard pressed to single out crucial errors we made. All the things we did "wrong" could be chalked up to middle school boys playing in an intense championship game. Our boys did everything we asked them to do, everything we had been coaching and training them to do since October. Back then we knew we had the talent to be a good team and we set our sights on these past two weekends as the tournaments we wanted to be ready for and knew we could compete in. Yet, there were never really any moments that we ever believed (at least as a coaching staff) that this group of guys would actually pull it all together they way they have over the past eight games and truly become a great team. But they did it and they earned these two championships and the invitation to play in the Lutheran schools state tournament in three weeks.

It will be a challenge to keep our guys focused for THREE weeks when they have accomplished what they have, but at this point they have earned some space to be goofy kids. But, if we can find a way to let them enjoy their just rewards AND get them re-focused, we are primed to make some noise at State.

25-5

This weekend's tournament is one of our favorites from last year, if not our favorite. We enjoy it for many reasons: it is run by a Missouri Synod Lutheran school (thus we get to see new/different teams), they do little things that make the tournament fun (selling buttons and beads for every school, team signs everywhere), we did really well last year (2nd place, ensuring that our school name will be in their tournament program for years to come), and because the competition gets good.

Our first two games of the tournament featured a scare and a slaughter. Our first opponent was a team we played last year in the second round and won easily, this time around it should have been easier but it did not play out that way. Our 6'2" center was visiting his sister at college for the day so we were forced into our "small" line-up. It should have not matter as we had our press going really well in the smaller gym that hosts the tournament. We used our traps to jump out to a 21-13 1Q lead with our scoring duo putting up 17 points between them in the quarter. In the second quarter, those two guys got all our points as our opponent adjusted to our tempo and barely lost the quarter to us, 14-13, extending our lead to 35-26 at half time.

In the third quarter, our go to guys got their buckets and a couple other guys pitched in on our way to a 20 point quarter. We lead 55-41 with one quarter to play and it looked like I might be coaching my first game ever where my team hit 70. The only problem was our opponent's point guard was having the best game of his life! With a shot that looked like it hurt him to even attempt he lead their crazy comeback in the 4Q. He got a little miracle help from a couple of his teammates as well as they simply could not miss anything that they threw towards the basket. Their point guard finished with 36 ridiculous points which included a buzzer beating 3 pointer at the end of the game- but we were up 4 when he hit it. Thus, we quietly walked away with a 62-61 victory having lost the 4Q 20-7. In the locker room we made sure that the guys understood that they should be glad, but not proud of the win. (BTW- our best player had a triple double, 20 points-13 rebounds-11 assists, which I am pretty sure is the first player I have ever coached who has done that!)

On top of our gross play- I have been battling my first ever sinus cold/flu/infection and this morning's game seemed to be the "pinnacle" of awfulness. On the way home I stopped at Walgreen's and found the strongest drugs they offered, came home, took some and slept for an hour or so and then laid in the tub with the hottest water I could get from my faucet for another 30+ minutes. After eating some soup and resting for another halfish hour, I took my shooting guard and another player to Ponderosa for dinner. Last year, I took our shooting guard to Ponderosa in between games at this same tournament and he responded that night with a 28 point outburst in 3 quarters of play. I was hoping he would do it again.

Well, he brought his "A" game- but it was completely unnecessary as we controlled the game literally from the opening tip. Our press proved too much for our quarter final opponent as we scored the first 12 points on our way to winning the 1Q 18-4. In the 2Q we limited their scoring to two free-throws while we scored 15 to lead 33-6 at half time. We won the 3Q 13-2 to take a 46-8 lead into the 4Q. All the while our bench guys were getting good extended minutes. We only had eight guys at the game, so we always had a couple starters on the floor to help facilitate our bench guys and their scoring. Even with a slowed down game, we managed to win the 4Q 11-7 and rolled to a 57-15 victory.

Our opponent tomorrow is a familiar one as they are from our conference and we have played (and beat) them twice this season. When we met in conference play at their gym, the officiating was a little off (their head coach actually apologized to me after the game for the officials) and we won by 3, in our tournament last week our best player was in major foul trouble and we still managed to win by 1 (the other game this year in which our opponent hit a 3 pointer at the buzzer when we were up by 4 to bring the final score to within one). I really would like to play somebody new, but we know that this team has yet to see us at our best and we are still 2-0 against them. We also know they really want to get us, so it should be a good game. Win or lose our second game Sunday is also going to be a battle- so it is shaping up to be a good test to see if last weekend was really who we are or if we just got hot and put it together for one weekend. We are hoping it is a repeat of a week ago.