What a total disaster.
There are several travel clubs in our area, and, I wanted Cpher to try out for one of the more established (and expensive) ones when they had tryouts for the summer season. My recollection is that this all happened during the many battles about wrestling and there was no chance of getting him to a tryout, so, I gave up and resigned myself (and him) to playing in the very local club. They practice at Chippewa, they are super cheap, and hey, any lacrosse is better than no lacrosse, right?
Wrong.
Cpher reports that the practices were a joke; not very organized and people didn’t really come to them. First tournament is the Great Lakes Invitational. The only good thing about the tournament is that it is here in Lansing.
We did actually win a game….we won the first game of the elimination round on Sunday. That just ended up prolonging the weekend so that we could get blasted, again, by this team from Ohio. For most of the tournament we didn’t have enough kids; we had to have age-eligible kids from the U17 team play with us. Last game on Saturday we only had 12 (you need 11 to play).
This means all kinds of offense for the other team and means that Cpher is going to be a very busy boy. I give him all kinds of credit, in that first blowout against Strongsville he was one of the very (very!) few kids who didn’t quit and let the other team do what they want. But the whole experience sucked.
The next tournament is two weeks later. It is obvious that our goalie won’t be there; the tournament is up in Traverse City and the hotel is very expensive. I ask the coach, I ask him twice, hey, are we going to have enough players? He says yes, he has a goalie, we are good.
Get up there….not so much. First game on Friday we have the goalie from the Lansing tournament. This is good; he is good, but an ominous sign since he can’t play for us the weekend. We still lose 10-0.
Saturday morning 9 am…..no goalie. We forfeit.
Next game they get the U13 goalie. We still get hammered. And that’s the theme for the rest of the tournament….we do play well in the final game on Saturday; we are actually winning at the half! Still lose by 5 goals though.
So Cpher got some (more) exercise….and we learn a lesson about travel lacrosse (and life in general). You get what you pay for.
Oops, almost forgot, since we were all going to be up in Traverse City we told Matthew to bring his lax stuff since we were sure they would not have enough subs. Matthew let them have 2 subs, not 1. Matthew, who, like the goalie, was younger than everyone else, played really well.
