The long-promised but never-delivered post-mortem on the Fall Season of soccer is here. And it is an interesting thing, since it now almost pointless to go over what went wrong.
1) The end-of-the-season awards had Matthew named as “most improved”. This is good; he certainly earned it…..he wasn’t playing “like Matthew” in August and by the end of October was the boy (and more!) that we are used to seeing. So that’s a good thing. But, it probably isn’t the award you really want to be getting.
For all that, there wasn’t another player who would get this award. If you awarded the reverse, “most disappointing”, well, I think there would have been a lot of candidates….
2) One of the disappointing notes of the Fall was the seeming disinterest of our coach; as the team struggled he seemed to check out more and more. So, it was surprising, but, not that surprising, when it was announced that our coach was leaving the club (and leaving coaching entirely for now, going into sales). And so all of the little annoying things seem to make sense now; he acted like everybody acts when they know they are heading out the door.
Think, for all that, he did a shitty job communicating this to the boys, some of which he has coached for three or four years. Ran into him at a training session in November; he said he wanted to get the team together to say a proper goodbye but I’ll believe that happens when it happens. If there is one thing he was good at it, it was big promises and not-so-big delivery.
3) So complaining or analyzing what went wrong in the Fall is kind of moot; it is all changing when practice restarts in January. I understand that the club, and new coach, plan on really clamping down on discipline, and I think this is a good thing. Many of the kids, mostly the kids who have been with Stu for 3 or 4 years, don’t listen in practice and then don’t do the things taught in practice in games (and he, infuriatingly, would do nothing about this). I hope they follow through with this promise in January. Early word is that the plan is to keep Matthew in his attacking center mid role……I’ve always felt (and have typed here) that the old coach would be very harsh on Matthew for some things and let other kids do the same things with no effect. So, we are looking forward to the change.
Upcoming Posts:
FTSD – Orange Crush Week 3, Week 4, and Week 5 (been spending more time on videos for these games then on blogging…but will fix that this week)
Henry Ford Museum
FTSD – Basketball Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, and Week 5 (see above about the videos…)
Dog Update
Kevin Update
The story of a broken bass
Ice Bucket Videos (I’ve got to get them out here before I forget!)
