Soccer

This is a picture of my futsal team after our final game a few weeks back. We took second place and lost to a team that some of my high school girls are on. It was a great game! We only lost by one! I really love playing with these ladies. All but two on our team are teachers! ( : Kind of fun! Oh, and we are the oldest team in our league! We already started another season and we are doing well.

Soccer has been on my mind a lot lately. Our spring teams started practice last week. It consists of the girls who will be on the high school team next year, plus many players from our biggest rival school, and a few from other schools up in Reno or Tahoe. We will sort through the players and break them down into two teams by the end of this week.

I've also been thinking about soccer a lot because I am in the process of getting my national "D" license for coaching. This involves taking a course, through the US Soccer Federation, which is fairly intensive. What I really mean by intensive is that for two weekends in a row I not only get learn about how to properly coach soccer, but I also play for about fifteen hours. Now, I love to play soccer, but fifteen hours within two days is a little much. "Why," you may be asking, "is she playing if she is taking a class on coaching?" Well, lemme splain.

The people who teach this course run us through a bunch of training sessions where we are the players. They teach us how to set up a practice properly and how to find both the technical and tactical breakdowns in our training sessions. It has been a completely eye-opening experience for me and I am excited to go to our spring soccer training session tomorrow and apply what I have been learning with my girls. After we are taught how to properly run a training session, we get to teach a training session to make sure we know how to do it. So one day we were taught, being the players, and the next day we taught, also being the players. Man, it was cuh-ray-zee how much I have been running lately! The nice thing is that I can. I am so grateful for my health and for my job that keeps me active and in shape. I'm not even sore, just tired.

One of the twists about this licensing course is that I am the ONLY girl! I think there are 17 students going for their licenses. It is one thing to play with high school girls, or even to play on an indoor women's league, but it is an entirely different monster to play with men! The pace they put on the ball is much different, therefore the pace of the game has been tremendously different. At one point this past weekend I was going one on one with a guy who was the last one to get cut from the German national team a couple of months ago. He is good, and I was nervous. After my approach I saw an opportunity to 'nutmeg' him (kick the ball between his legs) so I did it. It just so happened that everyone was watching, and you know how guys can get when they get schooled by a girl. I felt really bad because they wouldn't let him live it down the rest of the day.

It has been fun to get to know some coaches in the area; we talk about what our teams struggle with and get all sorts of great pointers from each other. Over the two day training course last weekend I was able to notice a change in my play, which is really exciting to me! I guess that if you persist in anything you can improve, especially if the persistence includes multiple hours of drills and games. It has been fun to learn new things and improve where I need to as a coach, and as a player!