Soccer: Another seasons of winter soccer has come and gone….finished with 2 wins, 3 losses, 2 ties. Not the best of indoor seasons
But….we played three sets of games back-to-back, and that’s a sure recipe for racking up losses on the back end (we went 1 and 2). We switched coaches (again!); the new coach is trying new things and one of the losses is almost directly because of that.
Matthew, as is a theme for everything since December, played at the very least ‘well’ and at times in my mind a lot better than that. After one game we lost a lot of other parents were very upset by the result….I was telling Suzanne I was not and that was almost 100% because Matthew kicked ass for the entirety of the game. He’s been a lot more consistent in that regard and that is good to see.
The new coach….the last coach resigned because he couldn’t deal with the commute anymore and I get that….he has a very young daughter and I think there were many nights he just wouldn’t see here. So ok. It, again, gives Matthew a new opportunity with a new coach. Pavol seems to be very heavily focused on the fitness end of the game, and happily, because of the things I’m about to talk about, Matthew might be in the best shape of the last two to three years….at least as good as it was at the end of cross-country 15 months ago. Consequently, he seems to be getting a little more playing time than some others and is showing why he should continue to get that time.
Futsal: The other new thing on the soccer front is that the club has added a futsal option for the winter. The executive summary of this is 2 additional practices a week on a basketball court in 4v4 soccer with a few games. And I think the games have been a disaster because this is the first year of the program and they’ve made some poor choices. But the training…..the practices are some serious work-outs and Matthew has had to really develop his footwork over the last three months. It’s just been an outstanding experience.
Spartan Performance: Since soccer ended in the fall and since there was no basketball on deck, Suzanne and I agreed to have Matthew do hour-long sessions at Spartan Performance. SP is a physical training program run through MSU; I think the short answer is that it gives them a place for their physical training students to ply their trade.
Matthew has been doing it since November; he is complaining now that it is more than a little repetitive and that’s unfortunate that they can’t seem to vary the training program more. I think everyone who sees Matthew, and especially Suzanne and I, have noticed what a difference those two hours a week have made. Just having someone show you and then force you to run a slightly different way is well worth the time and dollars we are spending here.
They ‘test’ him every month….and they provide some video of what he’s been doing between the first training session and the most recent
He’s got about another month left here (we won’t ask him to do this while trying to manage full-on soccer and lacrosse!). But I think we’ve learned enough this winter to plan on going back next winter.
Computer Building: The big project over the last two months has been Matthew’s desire to build a computer from scratch. This sounds a lot harder than it looks, mainly because there are about a jilliion youtube videos that tell you how to do it. And, as of last weekend, his ‘rig’ is set-up in his room and I hope we can get him to do something other than play games on it (Mom and Dad are hoping for some interest in coding….).
But it wasn’t as easy as watching a video and doing it….we thought we fried the motherboard and spend about three weeks wondering why we couldn’t get power to the system. Turns out that a) we didn’t install the motherboard to the case and were probably shorting it out at one point and b) the video led us astray on the connections from the case to the motherboard. Once we figured that part out (with a little help from the local computer shop) the fans started spinning and Matthew has been very happy ever since.
