Coach wil

I met with the director of one of the largest local youth soccer clubs this week. He is in desperate need of additional coaches for the coming year. A buddy mentioned my name and gave him my contact information so we’ve been chatting over email, and met to discuss things this past Wednesday evening.

I wanted to start out as an assistant coach, but the director is in need of head coaches right now more than anything. He is offering me a head coaching position with a second team of U13 (under 13 years of age) players. The pressure won’t be as bad as a first team, but it’s still my first time coaching. I’m a bit nervous about coaching a team on my own for the first time and the expectations parents, and even the players, may have. The director assures me that he will be more directly involved with teams run by new coaches and that with my background I should do fine. He said that I had to get my USSF D license over the summer for him to hire me, but that the club will pay for it. I liked that because I was already planning to do it, but out-of-pocket. He also said the club will provide a lot of the equipment I’ll need and money to defer costs of coaching. It all sounds good and maybe coaching with a large club is a good idea for beginning because of the support I can be offered (versus a small club). Another bonus is that the days of the week I would want to do practices are less desirable overall, so I shouldn’t have any scheduling conflicts for the fields. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that I have no experience. At least I’m good at organizing events – that should come in handy.

I’ve had a couple of my teammates from Winter League express interest in assisting with coaching some, so that may be a huge help too. I’m planning to do it at this point, if for no other reason than to stay on track with my coaching license progression. I really want to move forward with that and go even beyond the D level. I need to do it now, while I’m still in relatively decent shape because it won’t get any easier as I get older. It’s going to take a significant time commitment on my part to do all this, but I’m ready. If I can do calculus and work full time, I can do this. Besides, I’m bound to enjoy this more than calculus homework. I just hope this doesn’t cut too much into the fun I have playing.

Organizing soccer

I've been a little busy wrapping things up with the team for the Over-30s Winter League and trying to recruit players for the Open Summer League. So, I've been a little slow to update my Blog, sorry. We will finish up the Winter League this Sunday with a game against the Lynchburg College Club team (no, they are not over-30) but more on that later.

This past weekend was quite the adventure and our team was angry over the game results. We played a team that finished the season in third place. They were technically tied with us at the end of the season with a 7-2 record, but we were given the number two seed because we won the regular season match-up (albeit forfeit). The team is good, but we came on strong at the end of the season and would have beaten them had they not cheated. This is not just the whining of a sore loser. Keep in mind this is supposedly an Over-30s league.

They are a team consisting of more-than-half under-30s players – while we had 10 over-30s players (two of which were over-40). However, for the tournament match against us they brought another under-30 player that is an offensive ringer – a goal scoring machine. This guy will score if you give him the ball and some space – it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of how much. The problem is that he didn’t play with them all season long, and therefore should not have been allowed to play with them in the tournament (not to mention he wasn’t even near 30, let alone over-30). For the start of the game they only had seven players – the minimum number to not have to forfeit in these 8v8 games. Take away the illegal player and they were in a forfeit situation, but they were allowed to play. They had an eighth player join them shortly after the game started and in the second half they somehow magically produced 2-3 substitutes. This ineligible player scored four goals for them (not to mention he created two more). We lost the match 7-5, but most of the time the game play was actually in our favor. In fact, we came back from a deficit of 6-2 to make it 6-5. Plus, we missed two really close chances to tie the game and take the lead in the last five minutes of the game. We had complained about the illegal player before the match because more than half of our team knows the guy, at least by name. We continued our protest after the final whistle and were told that a decision would be made the next day regarding the game’s validity.

I followed up with an email to the guy running the league Monday morning that detailed our complaints about the results of the match. I also made note of the fact that the two teams in the final could not field one over-30s team between the two of them. The team which beat us and the other finals team (LC Club) couldn’t possibly be playing for the Over-30s League title because they weren’t over-30s teams to begin with. The head of the league made some concessions and now we are going to play LC Club this weekend. If we beat them, we should be awarded bragging rights since we are the only team to have beaten them (once already during the regular season, which they finished with an 8-1 record). If we lose to them we’ll move on – after all, they are 10-20 years our juniors.

Once that’s all done I’ll concentrate on pulling together our summer squad. The summer team will consist of the same core players (minus a couple) and add some young guys to the mix for legs. We are looking to be quite stacked for the summer league and should be in the hunt for the trophy. We will have a former semi-pro player, a former U17 international player, several former collegiate players, a couple former college club players and some young travel club players – and that’s just the ones that I know of. It should be fun if nothing else.

Fun Redo

I kind of cheated. There’s a neat game on Facebook where you create a fake album cover using random results from the web. I tried it out. The one I posted on Facebook was quite good, but I cheated a little. I took a mulligan on the first results and posted the second instead.

The first result gave me a town name in Poland as the band name and a photo from what appears to be the middle-east. They didn’t go together and the band name made no sense. Also, the random album name almost made the whole thing seem a little questionably racist. A picture of two men dressed in Arab clothing pointing with the title “you have ceased to live” just seemed sketchy (given the current terrorist fearing public). Plus, I’d never be in a band named after a Polish town I’ve never heard of in the first place. Combine that with the photo that didn’t fit and the potentially problematic album title, and I feel the redo was justified.

I figured I’d post the original here. Oddly, the redo included the same album name. Apparently the “random” quote link used for this game doesn’t give a random list of quotes every time you click. It must update on some periodic basis. I didn’t feel like changing it and it fit so well with the others that I couldn’t bring myself to risk it. I’ve posted both photos for you to see. The original has an international music feel to it, while the second seems very modern and definitely State-side.

The second image took a lot more work to create too. It was already a really cool image and the idea to place the album title in with the other text was one I just couldn’t pass up. I had to find the right font, color and texture to make it believable. Using my copy of Photoshop at work made the job a lot easier, but I had to get creative because the tools and skills used on this one were new to me. I think it came out well, though not perfect.