Left the house at 8 am Saturday morning; didn’t get home until 11 pm. Not all of that was sports, but, a lot of it was.
Christopher: Had his third football game, lost 16-14 to Holt. Last week our coach sent out an email after the rain-shortened game saying the loss was his fault….and I didn’t understand that, the game conditions were screwed up, everyone made the best of it, whatever. This time, though, it was clearly his fault….I was on the phone with Suzanne as we blew this game and was simply disgusted with how we lost (after literally marching up and down the field most of the second half).
It’s 14-8 Good Guys; fourth quarter, there’s 10 seconds on the clock, the ball is at the Holt 45 yard line. You would think we would be in some kind of prevent defense…but, no, same type of base defense and our safeties are not deep at all. Holt (surprise!) goes to throw a pass, our cornerback gets caught watching the backfield (why???), our safeties are nowhere to be found, the wide receiver is 5 yards behind the corner back when he catches the ball (and that’s a neat trick…kids can’t throw it that far at this age!) and 55 yards later it’s a touchdown. Holt kicks the extra point (if you kick at this age, you get 2 points if you are successful) and that’s that.
Christopher played well, I think. It’s hard to tell when he’s on the line. The line coach thought he played well, and when he limped off the field late in the fourth quarter everyone was happy that he was able to go back in because he had been doing such a good job. Still not quite there mentally, was again out on on the field with the starting defense when he shouldn’t have been.
I uploaded all of the video for the game at a site for the team…if you want to see Christopher in action I’d go for the offensive titled videos and he’s at tackle almost all of the time. He did not play much on defense and I need to go back and look at the video myself to see when he played there and how he did….
Kevin: The JV team was also in Holt for the Holt Invite….it rained a little in the morning and that held up the schedule and then half of the kids had to head over to Kiwanis Park for their matches.
The best part of that was that it meant that Kevin and Christopher were right next to each other in the morning and we got to see Kevin before heading over to the football game. Kevin played #3 singles again and his first match was a pro-set (to 8) against a kid from Portland. When we watched, Kevin did not look good; Suzanne speculates that Kevin sees me watching and completely falls apart….Kevin denies this. The kid from Portland is pretty good, and Kevin finds himself down 4-1 before coming back to make it 4-3 before we have to leave to head over for the football game.
From the top of the stands (where I was taping for football) you could look over and see the courts….I could tell Kevin was still playing….and he was still playing…and he was still playing. This could only be a good sign that he was coming back and making the match longer. Finally got this text from him:
“I WON!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8-6!!!!!!! I broke him to win it at the very end at 40-0!!!!!!!! Yay!!!!!!!!”
The other matches were at the high school and we were going to miss them since we had to get Matthew to soccer. Got this text much later:
“Didn’t have to play second match, won final against Jackson 6-4 6-3. Medals provided for winner and runner-up. Will receive medal.”
I have asked Kevin if I bother him when I watch his matches (because I will tell him what I think he needs to work on….when we got home late tonight we were talking about how he wasn’t following through on his swing and everything was going high). He says it’s not a problem…Suzanne still thinks I jinx him…
Matthew: Matthew had two TNT games….the games are down in Bloomfield Hills today. Happily, they were later in the afternoon and Christopher was able to come with us; sadly, this means Kevin had to get a ride home from the tennis meet and spend most of the evening here with only the springer spaniels to keep him company.
Game One: Played the other team that hadn’t lost in our division to this point and beat them 7-1. Matthew had 2 of the first 3 goals (and the assist on the third of those three)….the video is here.
Forgot I had this picture of part of the team…
Game Two: This game was played immediately after the first one….didn’t think the boys were that tired but, maybe they were. We played a team that had been moved up to our division after crushing the competition in their division in previous games. We lost, 6-4. The first team we’ve played in a while that has been able to take advantage of our weaknesses (some of our kids are terribly shaky on defense; this team sent 4 kids forward and took advantage of it) and they jumped up 2-0 within a minute. We battled back to make it 4-3 at one point and again gave up two goals due to some poor defensive choices (at one point our defender kicked it right back to the middle in front of our goalie…he might as well have set it on a tee….) and that was that.
Matthew played ok….he started on defense and that’s never a strength for him (he’s not patient enough…he wants to steal the ball right away where he’d be better off just defending and waiting for a better opportunity later).
In the second half he was at midfield and was carrying the ball up and, while making a sweet pass to set up a breakaway, was the recipient of the nastiest foul I’ve seen in a quite a while. Matthew is writhing on the ground in pain and is helped off the field. He seemed ok, and came back out on the field later in the game but had a limp (that disappeared when he needed a burst of speed at times). After the game he showed us a nasty set of cleat marks on the back of his upper thigh….he still has the imprints there today….
Can’t wait to play this team again; thought we controlled the game but just couldn’t convert after gifting them a bunch of goals.
Since we were down in Bloomfield Hills we decided that we would travel the extra 20 minutes to Dave and Busters for dinner (Fric and Frac happy; Kevin? not-so-much).
