Spring and Fall takes the Coles out to the WYSA soccer fields. My first year watching Reagan play and Matt coaching was the fall of 2008 when she was just a little 5 year old in a lime green t-shirt playing for the Gators. Matt had warned me that at that age it was pretty much the "fly on poop" mentality and all 6 of the kids on the field would just stick right to the ball and keep kicking until it popped loose. This is exactly what happened but it was still all kinds of fun to watch. I am pretty sure the kids enjoyed the parent tunnel that they ran through at the end of the game and snack more than actually playing at this point.
The next fall brought us to U8 and a new team - the Mustangs. The unfortunate part of this was that the mustangs wore red with black lettering and we played a game on just about every Saturday - the same days as UK football. I pretty much never supported the Mustangs by color, just in spirit. :) We were mustangs for 2 sessions, fall '09 and spring '10.
 |
| Spring 2010 Mustangs |
Fall '10 brought yet another change as Reagan decided it was time to move to an all girls team. We were given the Ladybugs. You can guess what colors we were - once again red and black and once again I failed at supporting the team by color but had lots of fun with the girls. At this point I had slowly become Matt's assistant coach. I would help run drills at practice and mainly took care of keeping the team under control on the bench and helping keep up with who needed to sub and making sure all the players got equal playing time. We had lots of players that wanted as much playing time as possible and always felt like they weren't getting as much as the other team mates. With the ladybugs we had 7 players. With 4 on the field at a time, this made it impossible to sub out all at the same time. So every player got extra time. One of my buddies - Anna Beth always wanted to make sure she got her extra time. I finally put together a list on my phone each game so she could see when everyone was getting their extra time and wouldn't worry about missing out. We stayed with the Ladybugs for the Spring of 2011 and had the same team with the exception of Sammie Jo taking the place of Olivia.
 |
| Fall 2010 Ladybugs |
This brings me to this session. This year we moved up to U10 and with that came more changes than I will probably be able to remember. We have a new team - the Stingers. New colors - Royal blue and white (yay!). New team mates - only Caylee is a previous Ladybug. New assistant coaches - with my hands a little more full, Andy (Matt's brother) and one of the team dads, Brian, has graciously stepped up to help Matt coach. Which is good since we are now playing 6 vs. 6 and one of those is a goalie. The girls have never played with a goalie, which means they have never played the position of goalie. After 4 years of preaching to them not to touch the ball with their hands, I am sure it is hard to get them to reach down and pick it up during a game. They are also faced with the daunting task of figuring out off sides. I have trouble with this concept so I can't imagine how they are figuring it out.
We had our first game this past weekend. We got beat pretty badly but our team is young with a lot of new girls to U10. They have a lot to learn but I think overall they will be okay. I just hope they all have a great time out there. I know I really enjoy watching them play and watching Matt coach. Alex can't say the same since he slept through the entire game Saturday. But mommy was thankful to be able to really watch the game and enjoy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment