OK! The Olympics are over. It’s time to start writing again…
In the last blog entry, I said that I would talk about what it’s like to play competitive soccer. Actually, I have only been playing competitive soccer since the spring, so I guess I can’t tell you everything, but I’m learning.
Playing on my comp team is really a lot of fun because all the girls are very dedicated, they work hard, and everyone wants to learn more and move up. It’s a lot more challenging and we’re playing much better teams than we did in rec soccer, although we are losing a lot more games. However, losing definitely shows us what we need to work on.
Some of the things that have been interesting to learn are all the different positions. We’re learning about strikers, and how to play all the right and left positions, as well as how to really play mid-field. There are also lots of new drills to learn, and now we’re even doing a lot of conditioning so we can be in shape and run fast for a whole game.
Traveling is exciting because we get to go to new places and new fields, and it also makes me appreciate playing at our home field, which is right down the street from me and has really good grass. You don’t really appreciate good grass until you’ve played on bad grass.
Playing stronger teams is fun, but one thing I miss about my recreational team was the rival teams. We only played 4 or 5 other teams so we ended up playing some teams three or four times. Once you get an enemy, you work harder to beat that team the next time they come around. Last year, our biggest rival was this team called the Pink Panthers. We beat them a few times and then they beat us, but I’ll tell you the whole story when I write a blog entry I’m planning about team rivals.
Our competitive team hasn’t really developed a big rivalry yet, because we play a lot more teams, but we’re starting to really want to beat this team that we played twice last spring. My mom said not to use their real team name because they’re on our game schedule this fall, so I’ll just call them, the “Tomatoes”. There is a big story about the “Tomatoes” too, but I’ll also save that one for the entry about rivals.
Team Camp
Since the last time I wrote, my team had a team camp. We spent more time practicing things we usually don’t have as much time for, such as step-over, pullback, fake turns, juggling, and even the Maradona. We did self-drills, and lots of scrimmages – 2v2, 3v3, and then full team with two goalies. After that we had our own Olympics, and the US won! Team camp was really fun, but also exhausting because we had our regular evening practices, and then a tournament on the weekend. (Tournament report coming soon).
Latest Local Soccer Events
In the last two weeks I’ve gone to two soccer games. The first one was the Earthquakes against the Seattle Sounders. My mom gave my grandma a ticket to the game for her birthday and my grandma went with me – her first professional soccer game! It was very exciting because Steven Lenhart scored in about the last minute of the game and they won.
The other game we went to was Stanford vs Santa Clara. I’m mentioning it because it was the first game ever broadcast on the Pac-12 network. Other than that, all I’m going to say is… Super. Total. Creamer. The only good thing is that the Broncos scored the first goal ever on the Pac-12 network. The Broncos are playing Cal Bears on Thursday afternoon and I wanted to go, but I have a practice, so I’ll just wish the Broncos good luck! Go Broncos!