The TNT season started with the Challenge Cup; the preseason tournament we won last year.
I show up at 7 am to volunteer; at 8 am, as games are supposed to start, thunderstorms roll in. Long story short, games until 1 pm are cancelled. We’re scheduled to play 3 games (4 if we do well) and the first one is toast.
Roll back in to the fields at 4 pm for our 4:45 game; everyone can see another huge band of thunderstorms coming this way. Our coach is late, he’s asked me to warm up the kids. The other team has asked to start early, because of the storms…..we kickoff at 4:31.
The team coming over to high-five the parents before the game
Our coach isn’t here still; I’m still at the controls…..I found I was very nervous about this turn of events. I spent a lot of time telling the boys to focus; the other team wasn’t going to care that their coach wasn’t here, the other team wasn’t going to care about the black clouds that were coming. We just needed to care about the game.
The boys held up their end of the deal….we dominated this team in our first adventure in 8v8 soccer. Our goalie never touched the ball, we had a bunch of shots on goal but were just wide on all of them (after the game, the real coach said “they don’t give out trophies for scoring opportunities”). Seems like teams I’m associated with always are a little challenged on the scoring front.
We are playing a 3 defense, 3 midfielders, 1 forward formation……Matthew seems to be locked into playing either Center-D or Center-Mid right now. For the whole 9 minutes this game lasted, he was only Center-D. He did a nice job of grabbing the ball and dribbling forward and outlet-ing the ball to his teammates.
Coach shows up after 5 minutes, I turn over the reins and head back to the parent-section. Four minutes later lightning and thunder are sighted and that’s that. Postponed, and then cancelled. We dominated them for nine minutes though.
