Soccer blogging season

It's soccer season on my blog through the end of May: after three seasons of coaching my oldest's U9 and U10 teams in 2015 and 2016, I'm coaching my youngest's U9 team for the first time.

We had our first game today and got routed by a very good team. I talked to the coach afterward and she told me that her kids have been playing together for years and she's been coaching them for 3 seasons. It shows! My team has a way to go before we can hang with a team like this one.

Maybe it was the hard ground, maybe it was first game nervousness, but between the two teams, I think we might have set a record for hand balls in this game. This was hard on our volunteer referees, who had to make a lot of decisions to call or not call based on advantage, which was unfortunate. It was a tough game to call.