This fall, Lucas and I have begun playing soccer on a homeschool team called the Fayetteville Crusaders. Our team is rather varied. It's supposed to be a varsity team, but we have high school students, junior high students, middle school students, and even an 11-year-old.
That fact is somewhat unfortunate for us, as many of the other high school teams have only large players. However, although some of our players are new (and quite a few could "use some improvement," to say the least, we have several very good players at the same time.
Our coach, noticing the aptitude a new player that recently joined the team has for being keeper (goalie), decided to start training him as keeper and put him in the goal so our official goalie could play as a midfielder.
As the new goalie, who is known as "Big Pete" or simply Pete to avoid confusion with Peter ("Little Peter," the 11-year-old), is quite inexperienced since he has never played soccer before (he plays football), it's been somewhat of a gamble to take our seasoned keeper out from the goal and put him up front. It's given mixed results, as he's let in several shots that our veteran goalie could probably have blocked, but then having Kyle, our experienced goalie up and try to score helps tremendously, as long as the ball stays on the other teams' side of the field.
Our first game of the season was on Tuesday the 19th of this month.
The opposing team, Fayetteville Christian School, (which is pretty much the best team in the league) has many skilled players, many of them large, and we didn't play as well as we could have, the game ended at 8-0. We did manage to hold them at eight points for around 40 minutes, though. In that game Kyle was still playing as keeper. I believe that if he hadn't been, the score would have been more like 80-0, because he blocked quite a few good shots.
Our coach put Pete in the goal at literally the last minute, and he caught one ball.
He joked afterward that he didn't let any shots go in the goal.
The second game was against a school called
Thankfully, the weather was much cooler and wasn't like the blazing heat we'd had to suffer during the FCS game. The players on this team are nowhere near as experienced as the FCS players, but they had some incredibly large guys on their team (the captain looked like he was around 6'6"), and once again our team failed to play anywhere near to its potential.
Kyle was out of town, so we didn't have him there to help.
However, we did score the first point, but that didn't prevent us from losing 7-1.
Our coach said the entire team wasn't going to the ball, and one of her favorite sayings is this:
"We can't win unless we have the ball!"
The good news is that we didn't continue the pattern we had started, or it would have gone like this: 8-0, 7-1, 6-2, 5-3, 4-4, 3-5, etc.
If that had happened, it would have taken us five more games after the first to win a game.
But that pattern was broken yesterday, on Monday the 25th, in the game against
Kyle was back from
In the first half, our team played better than we had the last game, but still not extremely well, and Northwood led 3-1 at the end of the first half. But in the second half, pretty much everyone on our team started to play better, and even the worst player on the team managed to get in the way of the opposing player with the ball and stop him for a second, and then someone on our team got the ball. That event in itself was a historical event, as he is always outran and beaten.
We scored several more points, and even though Kyle kicked the ball over the goal a whole bunch of times, we actually led 5-4 for some time. Unfortunately, the other team scored another goal and so the game ended in a tie, 5-5.
Coach Cindy was ecstatic, however, shouting "Yeah! We didn't lose!"
I was somewhat puzzled by that because we didn't win, but I must admit, it was very good not to have lost.
And that's all I have about our soccer season at the moment.
