Carter - End of Soccer Season

Carter finished his soccer season on Saturday.  This season was a little different for his team.  In the past, the team would split up and play two games on two adjacent fields.  However, this season, there were significantly fewer kids playing in Carter's age division (as well as the age group up) so the commissioner decided to have smaller teams this year that just play one game.  This meant Brian was going to have to cut kids from Carter's team (we've played with most of these boys for a few seasons now).  He did not want to do this (most of the kids had already signed up assuming they'd be playing with us).  So Brian decided to split the team into two teams (they would still practice together though during the week).  Also, there was no longer going to be a legacy league.  Previously there was a recreational league and a legacy league.  The legacy league wasn't necessarily an advanced division but it played that way somewhat because coaches were allowed to pick their teams (instead of having kids randomly assigned to them).  This was going to make it difficult to keep the kids together even if Brian coached two teams.

Brian's solution was to take the stronger 6 kids and play them an age group up in the U8 rec league.  The remaining 6 kids played in the U7 rec league.  This meant Brian had to now coach a total of 3 soccer games each Saturday (and one of those games would not even have one of his own children on the team).  But we thought that this would challenge all the players and only make them better.

Our U7 team struggled.  They did not really rise to the challenge.  We had hoped that not hiding behind the stronger kids in games would allow them more touches and an opportunity to score goals and make some good defensive plays.  With the exception of two players, the majority acted as if they didn't really want to be there most Saturdays.  It was frustrating for Brian who was missing his own kids' baseball games to coach these guys.  But they won a few.  And Carter got to play a couple of extra games (as well as some of the other U8 boys) when kids weren't able to make games.

The U8 team did AMAZING!  They only lost one game all season.  They 100% rose to the challenge and improved tremendously as the season progressed.  Brian even added a 30 minute goalie practice before our regular practice midway through the season (for both the U7 and U8 boys) and it really helped the U8 team finish with shutouts in 3 of the last 4 games.

On Saturday the boys got their participation trophies (and cupcakes that I made which were just like the ones I did for Rylan's team the week before).

This is an amazing group of boys who play fabulous soccer and are great friends!

I missed the first half of the game because I was at Rylan's baseball game but I did get a video of Carter and Jack working together to score a goal!