4-1

On Tuesday, the weather was nasty... and so was the work day. It seemed that any and everything that could go wrong, did. On top of the work day, our game was in East Troy- 45+ minutes away from our school. And it was raining all morning. I called their coach at lunch and learned that they had not gotten the bad rain that we had, so the game was still on.

Next to none of our parents were able to get to school 30 minutes before dismissal to help get us to the game, so we had to borrow a 15 passenger van from a friend of the family of one of our teachers. The only thing he asked was that we pick up the van and put it back when we were finished. Not a big problem, except that the van was a good 20+ minutes from the school- and the guy we were borrowing it from took the wrong keys to work the day of the game. SO, I had to leave school around 1:15 to drive to the exit to his house (30+ minutes from school) to get the keys and then to pick up the van and then get back to school. I took two wrong turns during the process and got back to the school with the van at 3:00. We managed to get the team excused, dressed and into the van with little trouble and were on the road by 3:30ish.

The ride to the game was easy and we were driving towards the sunny skies and out of the rain and clouds. The team we were playing was actually made up of two schools without enough kids to field a team and had beaten one of our opponents by a far greater score than we had. That made me a little apprehensive about our odds.

When we arrived at the field the first thing I noticed was that the goals were really small. (It ended up that our goalie was as tall as the goals and had about 2 feet to either side after his arms were stretched out.) When we got on the field I noticed that the field was also small. It was clearly a U12 or U10 field, when this happened during past seasons I have coached we ended up playing 8-on-8 because 11-on-11 is really cramped on fields this small. But, alas, we played with full line-ups.

Our opponent had a decent goalie and one player who clearly plays outside of school. (I knew this because his skill level was above pretty much everyone on the field and because he was wearing his club team's jersey which happened to be the same color as his school team's jersey.)

Early on we did a decent job of keeping the ball on their side of the field, but the sheer numbers of kids around the ball at all times gave us little opportunity to shoot, let alone score. Meanwhile, our opponents got a decent attack going down our weakside of defense, got a sweet cross pass that our keeper put two hands on but lost it behind his head and a forward was there to poke it in to take the 1-0 lead. The rest of the half was congested soccer with no further shots for either team.

In our first two wins this year (and only loss) we fell behind 1-0, so it was a familiar place for us to be. I was a bit concerned about our chances due to the field issues, with a field this size (plus the strong winds going on), almost anything could happen.

We got our first goal a couple minutes into the second half when one of our girls playing forward finally got one of her toe-poke shots to slip past the keeper into the back of the net to tie the game at 1-1. A few minutes later, our leading goal scorer had a sweet shot that curved past the keeper to give us a 2-1 lead. From that point to the end, their best player was doing all he could to put shots on the goal from further and further out- having apparently lost all faith in his teammates to score. Our defenders had indentified his being their only real scoring threat and did enough to not give him any good looks. We had a couple more scoring opportunities, but nothing serious and held on to win 2-1.

After passing through the "good game" line, I learned from their coach that their only other loss was to the same team we lost to. This was frustrating for me, since it now looks like that team will win the conference championship (and our conference's spot in the Lutheran conferences championship next week) having defeated us 1-0 when we were playing down 1-3 players against them. I really, really wish I had told their coach our situation and asked them to play even up with us.

This team has really been a struggle this year for me. As I told them on Tuesday, I cannot complain about their effort- it is clear they are giving me all they have got. But our attitudes our keeping us from being even better than we are. They remind me of one of the sons in Jesus' parable about the father who asked his sons to go work in the field. The first said, "Okay" but never went. The second said, "N0", but then went and did the work. My team this year is the second son. Oh well, one more game and then our tournament to go.