The Waverly Festival. Each boy has four games. And it was ugly ugly ugly; combined the teams go 1-7 and there isn’t a whole lot to write about.
We do have pictures! Cpher got the short end of the stick here since Matthew wanted to take pictures during some games and Kevin’s attempt during the last game ended up with nice pictures but no zoom. Sigh.
It was cold Saturday morning; this first set of pictures is from the second game that started at 1 pm. Cpher still has his sweatshirt on underneath the jersey.
Love this picture! The guy just shot the ball….and I didn’t include the other ones but Cpher gets his stick up and blocks it.
He was busy….we were under siege all day. We played teams that separated their 7/8 teams into A and B teams….we separate evenly. So, we beat B teams pretty handily….but A teams hand us our hats. We were in the ‘A’ bracket this weekend.
This is the first of the pictures from the first game of the day. Again, we got thumped.
It wasn’t any better for Matthew’s team. For many of Matthew’s games the teams are split up but for this festival we are all together. This is unfortunate on many levels…less playing time and less chemistry between the kids. Combine that with a poor decision or two by the coach (we put our best defense, best middie, and best attack lines out together…..which is fine, but, leaves the third lines out together as well….and that’s a disaster) and it was an ugly weekend.
Like Cpher, since we were under pressure all day long there was a lot of opportunity for Matthew to do something with the ball. And he grabbed the ball and took off upfield early and often.
Didn’t work out well too often. When three kids are on you, they are going to get the ball loose eventually.
One of the better pictures of the day….
The other cute thing about Matthew’s team is that some of the attack players decided to blame the defense for the problems…and really decided to single one kid out. Told Matthew that the proper response to all of that was “Shut the hell up” and “Be a better teammate; shut up”. Just not good to have that theme running through the weekend, and I don’t think the coaches did enough to stop it.
Two 7/8 teams; one 5/6 team are present at the festival. Combined record is 1-11; the only win is Cpher’s team on Saturday morning against Rockford.
And Cpher did a good job being active and challenging the ball. Still think he could make more of an effort to use his size as a benefit to his team….he likes to hang back from the scrums when I think he needs to just butt in and make his presence known.
More of the same from Matthew on Sunday. Wait, I missed talking about something in Cpher’s games….in that second game Saturday, aside from getting whupped, Cpher and one of the opponents combined to do something really awful; bend his d-pole! So, that meant a very expensive purchase of a new shaft! His old shaft was the one I bought to play catch with Kevin, so, not completely torn up that this happened….it was a cheaper intro-model.
The new shaft is top of the line….and Matthew asked nicely to use it for his first game…you can see him with it here. Matthew didn’t like it (it was the first time he had ever used the longer shaft) and threw it out to the sideline and went with his usual short stick for the rest of the game. We’ve talked…if he is going to play defense exclusively he needs to transition to that long pole at the start of the season next year.
Matthew and Zac….Zac is the soccer goalie and these two play defense together in lax all the time.
In the final game of the day they mixed the positions up (part of this was to address the attack-blame-defense going on this weekend; a lot of those attack players got to play defense this game.
So Matthew is up at middie here. And you can guess how this faceoff went by just looking at the picture.
After the faceoff; heading upfield.
After the 2nd game on Sunday; Matthew and I took off to head northeast to his soccer game. I’ll hit that in the next post.
