We've been dealing with soccer woes. Our little team is composed of the loveliest girls. Couldn't ask for better. They are very positive and compliment each other and try hard. But when it comes to games...that is different.
We are not only one of the youngest teams with the least experienced players, we also have one of the smallest teams (in terms of number of players). So fewer subs which results in more tired children.
There's another team on the league that has some really, really fabulous players. For their age, they are awesome and they should have been playing up a level. But they're not. The major problem with this team is that they are rude. They usually win about 10-0. During the game they consistently make comments to our team such as "you suck", "you losers", "you can't even score", etc. I didn't know 8-9 year old girls had such vocabularies! The real downside is that we play this team a total of 4 times this season (the most we play any team).
Yesterday Christe let the girls do all sorts of complaining about the other team and tell her all the mean comments and frustrating things. Then, she said, they had to put it behind them.
She laid out some goals for the girls. Winning, in this case, is not the ultimate goal. And since the other team makes it harder to even just have fun, that's not a good ultimate goal. It's hard to be a good sport when the winning team is rude!
Our goal is to slow them down - particularly R, their star player. Christe spent the entire practice yesterday teaching a portion of our team how to double-team effectively. I worked with the other girls on how to play more effective defense and help protect the goalie. They are such hard working little girls! They love playing and never give up!
We play the "mean team" again on Saturday (twice in a row - not fair!!!). We'll see how our double-teaming works out. Christe picked our fastest players (of which Brynne is one) to shadow R and slow down her scoring. And she told the girls, "when the other team gets frustrated, they start saying mean things. You'll know our secret plan is working when they are annoyed that they can't score as easily as they want to!" The girls were very excited to have a 'secret plan'. Hopefully it works out alright!
2 comments:
The tattle-tail, hater of unfairness in me is not liking this situation. Do the coaches not know or not care that their players are so mean?
Last time the referee was the other coach's daughter. ?????
The other coach is very hard to talk to. And, since you can't necessarily hear what the players are saying on the field, you have to take their word for it. But this is the only team that our team complains about it. Plus the league president said that other coaches have been complaining about this team - so they seem to have some issues.
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