Soccer Sunday

It's soccer season and in a family with five children (three of them old enough to play), that means nightly trips to the soccer fields. We have one playing on Mondays, on on Tuesday and Thursday and one on Wednesday. Every team in every division plays a game on Soccer Sunday, however, and that's when team photos are taken as well.

What that means for us, as a family, is that we had to get to the fields at 1130 in the morning yesterday and couldn't leave until after 430 in the afternoon.

Needless to say, my shaved head is a wonderful shade of purple today, it is so burnt. Even just arching my eyebrows causes pain.

Leyton is an active player, which is a start. In his age group, it's really nothing more than partially controlled chaos. He runs, but I'm not sure he knows why he's running. He seems interested and his attention doesn't wander on the field, which is far more than I can say about many of his teammates.

Sebastian scored two goals in a scrimmage the other day. Those are the first two goals scored by one of my kids in the combined five seasons of play. When they put the uniforms on for the first time, however, it was as if he had never even seen a soccer ball before. Sebastian should be much better at this than he is, and he has improved, but something just doesn't click with him and soccer. He's a step or two behind everybody else.

Lillian's team is in the 8-10 age group and you can see a big difference in the play. There was an actual pass, on purpose, to an open teammate that lead directly to a goal. I had never seen one of kids' teams run a play before. As Brittany noted, it will probably be until the boys get into that age group that I'll see one from their teams. Still, Lillian did some good things and she ran hard and seemed to have an idea of where she should be. You can tell that for the first time, there is a deeper thinking put into playing the game; it's not just about chasing the ball anymore. So that's cool. Makes for a far more entertaining game.

It was a long day in the hot sun and I certainly wasn't the only person to suffer the effects. But it's behind us now for another year. Now, we get shorter, but more frequent doses of youth soccer.