Soccer is Life (the rest is just details)

This weekend begins the pre-season soccer tournament portion of my summer. It's a bit difficult for me to adjust to soccer up here because it is so different from how I grew up playing. When I was playing, we took the winter off (at least before I got to high school) and played tournaments all through the summer. If people were gone for a week, they made sure they were back for the tournament on the weekend, and we didn't consistently have half of the team show up for practice.

But up here, I just can't figure out why about half the parents on my team seem to think that it's okay to miss one, even two tournaments. My family would have never done that (unless absolutely necessary due to a family reunion or something).

Suffice to say, it hasn't been a great summer of practicing. There's only so much I can do when only 8 or 9 kids show up to practice. Unfortunately for those that show up ever week, we have to repeat a lot of things, because it's impossible to move on to more difficult ideas until everybody has had a chance to work on the basics.

Then there's also the problem of none of them coming to practice willing to work. Half of them giggle most of the time, and the other half just go through the motions, not even trying. Practice was never the strong part of my game until high school (I just need pressure to perform well), but at least I had a work ethic at practice. My team won't run unless I sit there yelling at them the whole time.

Anyways, all this leads to me being very worried about our tournament that are happening in August, not the least because I don't even know who is going to show up for them. But we finally had a good practice last night (even if it was with only 8 of them), so hopefully it won't be as bad as I expect.

I should add that while I love winning, that's never my goal when I coach. My goal is that we should improve every game, so perhaps it's good (in a wrong sort of way) if we start at a really low spot.

Of course, none of this is helped by the fact that we don't have a goalie..... anybody know how to doctor birth certificates?