Rewind to last spring. My son decided not to play baseball. He said baseball was too boring. Hard to disagree with that -- so much standing around. Instead he wanted to play spring soccer. The only catch was that there weren't enough kids registered to have a U12 town league. So they put him on a travel team. There were two practices a week and we'd have to travel to other towns for games. No problem. He had a great coach and he enjoyed it a lot.
Forward to August. He had such a good time in the spring that he wanted to play travel soccer again in the fall. He liked the competitive atmosphere, playing on better fields and having "real" referees. But there was a problem -- There were 15 kids registered and assigned to a team, but there was no coach. The league reached out to the 30 parents. One stepped up as Team Manager. Another stepped up as Assistant Coach. But still there was no Head Coach. It wasn't clear what would happen if no one stepped forward. Would the team be dismembered? Would the kids get to play at all? Weeks went by and nothing was resolved. So I stepped forward.
I had never coached soccer before. I've coached other sports, and I know the rules to soccer, but I don't pretend to know anything about the game. The whole reason I volunteered was to make sure the kids had a soccer season. I figured 90% of the job was to organize practices and get the ball rolling. We'd figure out the rest as we went along. And so we did.
I successfully recruited a second assistant and we began practicing in mid August. The initial practices were a bit rough. I found drills on the web. My assistants brought forth their own activities. We scrimmaged amongst ourselves. And we ran and ran to get in shape. We had a team.
But when the season started we still weren't ready. Some of the teams we'd be playing had been practicing since August 1. Some had played in Labor Day tournaments -- they'd have three or four games under their belts. Plus they had "real" soccer coaches to get them ready. We dropped our first game 4-1. We weren't competitive. How bad were we?
Since we began practicing I'd sought scrimmage partners. Every kid alive would rather scrimmage than practice drills. And the whole reason the kids play is to have fun. On top of that our biggest problem was spacing. The kids were clustering too close together, making passing impossible, making themselves too easy to defend, and getting themselves out of position on defense. We needed to practice 8 on 8 to work on that. So I reached out further for scrimmage partners.
In the coming weeks we scrimmaged against anybody and everybody we could find. We squared off against two U-12 intramural teams, an advanced U-10 travel team, and even a girls U-12 team. We kept practicing two times a week. We had a couple of clinics by a referee. And we had a weekly skills clinic with a former marine turned high school coach. The team got better. As it turned out our schedule was front loaded. We played a tough schedule the first half. Four of our first 5 games were against top teams. At the half way point we had won 1, lost two and tied 2.
Then came the Columbus Day Tournament. This was when I'd hoped we'd come together. This would allow the kids to spend some time together. A scheduling snafu meant we'd have to play 3 games on 1 day. And it was HOT out! And again we ran into tough competition. There was a good team from Watertown, and an upper tier host Natick squad. We dropped the first two in competitive games, but got it all together for the third. We beat a good Sharon team; both teams on tired legs. And we took that momentum with us back into League play.
We opened the second half of the season against the league leading Arlington team that had beat us easily the first game of the season. They were 5-0 and their confidence showed. But our kids were up to the challenge. We played a very strong game and beat them 3-1. And we kept winning. Our only loss in our last five games was 5-4 heartbreaker to the eventual league champion, Weston. And even in that one we carried the play. Unfortunately for us the game was played in a cold driving rain that would later turn into the first October snow storm in many years in Massachusetts. After falling behind early we were coming back strong when the game was ended early due to the conditions. No matter, the kids had a great second half to the season. We went 4-1 those last 5 games and the guys can be proud of that.
The last two games we used to try to get goals for some of the guys who hadn't scored. One of the greatest feelings was watching one of our primary goalies capitalize on his chance to score. A couple other guys who had played mostly defense came real close too. By the end, 12 out the 14 kids had scored goals. It was great to see the kids who were used to scoring trying their hardest to set up their unsung teammates for scoring chances.
Kids sports isn't about winning and losing. It's about a group of kids coming together and creating a team. It's about learning and working hard to make the whole greater than the individual parts. And it's about having fun. We did that!
Framingham Blue Devils
