Two weekend ago was the opening of soccer season and the first regular games were this past weekend. Andrew is playing on a team for the first time (he made the age cutoff by 11 days) and I am one of the coaches for his team while Gina has moved up to U8 girls. For Gina this means practice once a week, longer games on a bigger field, six players per side and a larger goal, but still no goalie.Both Andrew and Gina got blue uniforms, Andrews team is the Rhinos while Gina's team is the Sharks.
Andrew was really excited to get his own uniform and play in a game like his big sister. For the opening weekend, they have the under 5 and under 6 kids play some fun games with the coaches and then they spend about 20 minutes playing small games. The whole setup was fairly chaotic. They ended up pairing Andrew's team up with an under 5 girls team. It might have worked except that a couple of the boys have a clue about the game and none of the girls seemed to know what to do. Several ended up crying, I felt really bad about that. Hopefully the rest of their season will be better.For opening weekend, Gina's team played two twenty minute games on Saturday and a longer game on Sunday and they won all three games. There are a couple of girls on her team that are really good. This past weekend, I didn't get to see all of Gina's game since I had to go coach Andrew's game, but apparently they won 9-2 and Gina scored a goal. It is really tempting as a parent to coach from the sidelines, yelling at your child to kick the ball, but I am really trying to resist the temptation and just watch the game and let her learn as she plays.
For the under 5 teams, they have half an hour of practice and then a half an hour for a game. We had the boys running around, practicing throw ins and dribbling. Then the team is split so that there are two 3 v 3 games going on. I didn't get a chance to really watch Andrew play but he said that he had fun.
