Parent's meeting

We held the parent's meeting on Monday night and discussed many items. I'll try to capture them all below:

1. We lost four players for the Winter and Spring seasons: Justin, Damien, Franco and Danny
2. Two more players will not likely join us next fall: Joey and Jake
3. In addition, three players will be considering another sport their primary sport in the spring: Joey, Jake and Dario. This is especially problematic for a Spring tournament.
4. That leaves us with eleven players going into the Spring. I will be working with Wayne Soccer Club and on my own to recruit more players so that we don't have to fold in the spring. We cannot enter Spring session with only eleven players. That would mean we would likely start every game short one or two players.
5. We decided to save some trainer money by not having any more game day trainers in the winter and spring
6. We also want to consolidate trainers to just Leo for the spring.
7. There is money in the budget for a spring OR winter tournament.
8. We decided we should spend this on the Winter tournament. $375 covers almost the entire cost of the tournament, (It's $445) leaving us needing to collect about $10 per child total to cover the remainder plus referee fees.
9. Bruce will contact Renee to get Xavier's card reinstated so that he can help on the game day assistance Bruce needs.
10. Other parents volunteered to assist Bruce in some of the random needs so that he can concentrate on recruiting.
11. Bruce also needs to find out from Renee when to register for the Spring season. We will hold off on this decision until we know if we have a team or not.

Parent's meeting

I probably gave too many options for a parent's meeting resulting in no more than three people voting on any of the nights. I'm also disappointed that only eight of the parents voted at all. So we'll try it one more time, this time with only two choices of dates. Look to your left and cast your vote so that the majority of us can meet and make some decisions about what we want to do with the boys this winter and spring.

What a season!

I can't tell you how proud I am of this team. The season looked really difficult from the beginning. With a screwed up recruitment process we only picked up one new player. I was stuck as the only coach and made a lot of mistakes from the beginning. We played with almost no subs the entire season. Some games we played with 9 or 10 players. And there we were in the premier flight of the league. It looked like a recipe for being blown out most games.

 

I gave the parents who made it to my parent's meeting my coaching philosophy: "I want the boys to have fun, exit the season better players than they entered it and not to get blown out all their games or to blow out their opponents." Let's see how we did meeting those goals.

 

• You'll have to ask your boys if they had fun, I know my two boys did.
• I can tell you that most learned a lot this season. The practice attendance was really quite good, (see below for details) and they learned some great drills with Leo and Julio as the coaches that they put into practice in the games. I saw tremendous improvement in Sebastian, Roberto, David and Liam.
• We were only blown out by one team but even in that game they played keep-away for only the last few minutes of the game.
• And we finished the season quite respectably: Three wins, six losses and a tie.

 

The big problem that plagued us throughout the season was a lack of substitutes. It didn't help having two injured players and two who were committed to another team. But I am really disappointed in the lack of support I received from the club in this area. I was constantly offered help but those offering it didn't follow through. I will be dealing with the club over the winter to try and get some help here. I will hold Rene's feet to the fire to have him get me the help he promised.
The only good side to this problem was that the players got plenty of playing time and were in terrific shape by the end of the season.

 

Let's have a parent's meeting after Thanksgiving to discuss the past season, the winter training, the spring season and any help you would like to offer me. Please vote on when you can attend and I'll set it up for a time that works for everyone. Vote on which days work for you and I'll pick the most popular.