Saturday, June 26, 2010

The Tri-Cities Tournament

Another weekend, another soccer tournament.  Luckily for my body and my truck, this time we're playing in Fargo.  The Tri-Cities Tournament brings together teams from the Fargo-Moorhead area as well as sides from the all over North Dakota and Minnesota.

The first game was 8:00 am Saturday morning, so forget all that sleeping in crap just because it's the weekend.  It was actually a good thing, as we got the game in just ahead of a big thunderstorm.  The opponent was the Red River Soccer Club Strikers, a U-10 team that crushed us 11-0 in the opening day of the Sioux Falls tournament.  Our Pumas played tentative from the start, letting the older girls push them around to the tune of a 6-0 deficit in the first 15 minutes.  I turned to another parent, my assistant coach on the rec team, and said, "they're not pissed off yet.  They need to get pissed off."

Sure enough, they got tired of getting pushed around and started pushing back.  The scoring went 2-2 the rest of the way for a final of 8-2.  If they had come out mad to start the game...

During the game Macy played goalkeeper in the second half and did very well.  The coach wanted her to punt the ball though, which mortified Macy as she didn't know how.  She felt terrible about this.  Seriously.  So we headed back to the field an hour before the second match so I could teach her the basics.  I was pretty stoked that a couple of my girls from the rec team showed up and wanted to learn too.  It's like they see me a coach or something.  Anyway, we got a half-hour of punting practice in and were ready for the game.

Our second match was against a team from I'm not sure where.  I believe they were from the Detroit Lakes, MN area, but don't hold me to that.  Macy started on the forward line, and for once the team came out playing hard and wasn't intimidated.  We led 3-0 at the half and Macy took a nice center from the wing to score a goal.  It was her first tournament goal and she was excited to say the least.  Good times.

She played goal in the second half and wasn't as successful.  She played tight for some reason; she didn't have a lot of get-up-and-go.  She made a ton of saves, but also gave up three goals.  Luckily we also scored in the second half and hung on for a 4-3 win.  I will say her punting was excellent though.

We've got one more game tomorrow, but for now here are some Macy pics:

(This is it -- Macy's first tournament goal!)

More pictures can be seen here.

No comments:

Post a Comment