Anything Goes Preview

 

Went to the Collage Concert last Saturday night.  Last time that we’ll have artwork hanging on the walls for a long time (unless one of the kids goes hard towards art in high school I guess, but, since we seem fairly committed to music around here, that seems unlikely)

Matthew didn’t think any of his artwork would be up on the wall; he went through a dry spell of cast-related poor art production…but, here it is.

I was amazed last year, and am amazed this year, at just how talented the kids in this community are.  The school district gets the highest test scores in the area (and it’s not really close).  The sports teams are generally great if not excellent.  And then there’s this Collage Concert where there are about 12 performances, presented right after another, for 35 minutes in each act.  Just amazing, you seem some kids singing in the elite choir, and then a few of those same kids appear in the band, and then they have the song from the musical, and then you see those kids in those costumes in different ensembles for the rest of the night.

Kevin’s one of those multi-performing kids, he wore his sailor outfit from the musical number as he played in the orchestra for the other two songs.  They played two of three pieces uploaded a few posts back (the Russlan and the Serenade) so I didn’t tape them again.  And I forgot the video camera.

But, I did tape the musical preview with the Iphone, so, you have that if you want to watch it.  Because it’s the Iphone, I didn’t zoom in…Kevin starts on the right and migrates to the center..he is in a blue shirt and one of the tallest out there.  Reported that he had a hard time keeping his hat on and that was a distraction….

Click on the picture to go to the video.  It is not great.  I will tape for real when the musical happens at the end of April…..

They Test Them, We Report It

 

Kevin:  Took the ACT again in February.  Like much of Kevin’s life nowadays, good, with twinges of disappointment.  Good in that his composite score will pretty much get him into whatever college he wants to go to and we could afford.  Bad in that he dropped(!) three points in Science….just don’t understand it.  Kevin was pretty cheesed off about it too….taking the SAT in early May….

Matthew:  They ‘changed’ the way they report standardized scores state-wide….what that means that most school districts have seen a drop of 15% percent on kids that achieve a proficient score in each subject.  Matthew is solidly proficient and even a little advanced, but really, since they moved the bar, I don’t know what the hell that means.

The latest haircut….he wanted the buzz, he got the buzz….

Cpher:  I don’t think moving the bar helped Cpher at all…..not a rosy picture here.  Doing ok in reading, math is the strength but completely butchered science (which has been one of his strongest subjects all year at school).  Will be a big topic at the upcoming p/t conferences…..

This is what greeted us as we woke up on Saturday morning, Christopher just grinning with the hat and beard on.  Matthew ended up wearing the get-up to soccer later that day…..

A Classical Interlude

 

The OHS Philharmonic performed at the District Festival two weekends back; I uploaded the video of the three pieces so click through if you would like to listen; the first two are about five minutes, the last one is about ten….

The video is boring….Kevin sits in front of the tuba….

The Russlan and Ludmilla Overture by Mikhail Glinka

The second movement from Serenade for Strings by Edward Elgar

The fourth movement from Antonin Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony

Scrimmage–Outdoors!

 

First, some coming attractions:

• Greektown (A Suzanne and Scott night out!)
• The last of the elementary music programs….
• A discussion of recent results in standardized tests

But, today’s post is all about the soccer (again).  Since this has been the strangest winter ever, our coach really tempted fate and scheduled a scrimmage outdoors.  And lo and behold it’s 60 and sunny with a little bit of wind from the southwest…..a nice day to be outside. 

The U10s split into two teams and scrimmaged for three 25-minute periods.  No score was kept; but, I filmed most of the first and some of the second period before I got tired of it.  Of course, Matthew scores the last two goals of the scrimmage and I have no tape of that!

But, I did clip out about 2 minutes of tape to keep forever, and, it gives me something to talk about here…you can click on any of the pictures to get to the video….

I haven’t done it much, but, I sat down with Matthew and watched these clips…I wanted him to tell him how well he was doing in certain cases and follow-up on one defensive technique in another.  Here, Matthew does what I think he does better than almost anyone else…he is about to take possession of the ball and make a pass that is going to release one of our forwards to score.  When Matthew is active on defense and in the middle of the field our offense  becomes very hard to stop….

it’s a crappy picture, but, this is Matthew doing what Matthew does best….heading a ball out of the center of the field.  Again, two touches later and this ball is in the back of the net for another goal…..

It looks like the plan is that if we have seven players on the field, we'll be configured with 1 forward up front and 2 kids back for defense.  The other four will be midfielders loosely configured in a diamond-shape…one boy will be a more offensive midfielder, two on the wings, and then a more defensive midfielder….and that role seems to be where Matthew is going to end up.  That will probably allow him to be more engaged on offense and produce more moments like this one where he has moved right, cut back, and takes a left(!) shot that beats the goalie but is stopped short of the goal line by a defender.  Really happy that he tried to score left-footed.

The transition away from total defense was not without difficulty….Matthew is very conscientious about defense and if the backs drift forward he will naturally fall back to cover for them…..the coach was talking to him quite a bit about this today….

This photo is in the 2nd period; Matthew has just taken possession of the ball and is about to pass it up the field and release a forward for a nice run.

As the game went on I stopped taping the ball and just focused on Matthew…I wanted him to see the difference between the 1st period, when he was active and on the ball, and the second, where he was tired and just kind of running back and forth and not really making any effort to interact with the ball.  And, that’s what mostly happened….but there was this play, where he did step up and take possession of the ball, and it’s about a minute of video that I decided to keep.

You can hear me say this on the video (I kept the audio after the play where I’m talking with Suzanne) but I wasn’t very happy that Matthew passed the ball almost as soon as he took possession….that is almost always a sure sign that he’s tired….just wants to get rid of the ball instead of dribbling.  And here, he had a whole bunch of room in front of him to dribble.

But, he passed, and you can hear the coach say nice job and then talk to Matthew and say maybe he could have passed it sooner……

Matthew and I have watched it a few times….once for me to apologize for doubting his soccer-genius, but another time or two to see if he could have passed it sooner.  We finally agreed that he probably couldn’t have…..he gets the ball, gets possession as he looks up, and kicks it…there isn’t even a second dribble.

I still think I’d rather see him dribble more….I think the team would rather see the ball at his feet than somewhere else.  But what do I know?

Drama

Figured I should spend a moment writing about the soccer drama going on recently.  There’s not much I can do about it, and Matthew isn’t primarily affected by it….but, almost every conversation I have with a soccer mom or dad turns into a discussion about what’s going on.

So what’s going on?  The explanation requires some explanation…..I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this here before or not, but, Matthew plays U10; that’s the team with all the boys who are Under 10 years old as of
August 1, 2011.  You can not ‘play down’, on a U9 team, under any circumstance.  You can play up, on a U11 team, if you are good enough and you choose to.  That’s essentially what Matthew did when he played with the CASL team I coached.

Many clubs are very strict about this, if you are U10 you play U10…..the clubs we played last fall for the most part were strict about that, the club Matthew plays for now is pretty strict about it at the older ages.  But right now?  There were at least six U10s playing up as U11s in the fall.

You may have a few questions at this point:  Could Matthew play up?  Certainly….he’s big enough size wise and he’s good enough talent wise.  I’ve always thought it better for Matthew to learn to dominate in his age group AND Suzanne and I are very happy with Matthew’s coach.   Why do other kids play up?  I think, for most of them, it’s that they started with that age group when they started travel soccer and have just continued to play with that group.  A few of them play up because, in my mind, their parents want to be able say that their kid plays up.

There’s two other things I want to point out…1) having all of these kids play up dilutes the talent on Matthew’s team….it’s one of the reasons I think we fared poorly last fall, those clubs had their 12-13 best U10’s, and our club has pushed/allowed 6 of our U10s to play U11 and 2) the worst part is that the U11 teams just aren’t that good….Matthew’s team dominates the 2nd team and has played the 1st team four times…we’re 3-1.

The beginning of the drama I have no real issue with; one set of parents decided the best thing for their U10 was to come back down for U11 to U10.  I’m sure if their son was playing on the first team they wouldn’t be making this choice, but, he’s on the 2nd team, and they asked and he started practicing with us in January.  I don’t have an issue with this, in fact, I’ve been trying to get good friends of ours to do the same thing with their son (a U10 who plays U11 but is on the 2nd team); I think we play better competition and we’re a better team.  So, he’s practicing with us and I think he’s doing pretty well; our coach has him playing more forward/midfield instead of the mid/defense that his U11 coach had him at.

So now our team has one extra player, and at mid-year evaluations the coach has decided to have a few players move back and forth between the the U10 1st team and U10 2nd team.  I don’t like this because it hurts team continuity (and I’ve said this in the past) but I understand why the coach does it, it allows a boy to play with the 1st team and you can see how he plays with better teammates and it allows a player to move down and perhaps regain the confidence to dominate if he is feeling overwhelmed against the better competition of the 1st team.

So, the coach has made the decision to move four players up and down.   No parent is going to be happy hearing their son is going o have to play down, and when I heard the names I was ok with three of them but was a little surprised by the fourth.  I haven’t seen the one kid at a practice since the announcement, and the other parent has been understandably disappointed  but has resolved to approach it with their son as a challenge to show the coach he was wrong.  

Third part of the drama is the part I have the most issues with….the U11 coach, for reasons that make no sense to me, has decided to invite two of our U10s to play with the U11s in the third indoor session.  I’m not sure why he chose these two kids….I guess the think that gets me the most that if he made this decision because of his keen evaluation of soccer talent (the coach is the owner of the club) than I respectfully disagree; the two kids he chose aren’t even in the top 4 by my thinking.  What these two kids do do, at times, is score goals if they can get the ball and maybe make a move….they are largely disinterested in doing much else on the field at other times. 

I’m not sure what I would have done if Matthew would have been asked; my understanding was that the offer is only for the indoor session so we probably would have done that to play more, but, under no circumstance would Matthew have gone permanently up to U11….we’re very happy with his coach.

So now you have the rest of the team going “Why them?”…and now, last Monday, another U10-playing-U11 decides that they want to come down and play U10.  Matthew’s first impression of this kid wasn’t all that kind (Dad, he’s cocky) and I remember when the first kid that came down played with us in 2011…he was that way “Oooh, I’m a U10 playing U11 and I’m better than you guys”; it took a little bit of time with us to stop that attitude”.  And rumor has that this switch may now be permanent, two go up, two come down. 

Every practice now, almost every conversation, is about this player movement and the impact of the moves or if they are going to happen.  I think the club is just outright stupid to have allowed all of this to happen, you’ve made two or three parents happier but pissed off at least that many other sets of parents and given a negative impression to that many more parents. 

Impact on Matthew (since I guess that what’s really matters)?  Limited, I think the team chemistry suffers as we adjust.,  Best-case?  The two U-10s that went up for indoor come back and the two new kids stay; to me, that pushes two of the not-so-good kids off the roster to the 2nd team.  Worst-case?  All four play but nobody goes down and everyone loses a little bit of playing time.

Just don’t understand why it’s even happening at all…..

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

 

This nugget of happiness arrived in the emailbox Monday am.

Christopher, upon arriving at home, was very apologetic and began offering up punishments (give up his phone, take his tv, etc…).

Asked him what happened….he said he was in line at gym, and this kid was poking him. Poked him once, poked him twice, poked him again and Christopher said “if you poke me again I’m gong to hit you”.  Poked again, Cpher grabbed broom and hit him with the brush end first.  

I asked why he grabbed the broom; no real reason for it….asked him why he didn’t just push or hit the kid, shrugged his shoulders.  I find that I disagree with the counselors in this matter; I’d rather he punched or pushed and not went for a ‘weapon’; they say if he had done that the punishment at school would have been worse. 

I think I would have been ok with Cpher punching the kid and the punishments that came with it….seems like Cpher warned him and gave him more than enough chances to stop it.  I leave all comments about “poking the bear” to others. 

Punishment at home?  Minimal.  More talking than anything else. More focus on the weapon aspect than anything else….