Dylan played football and soccer this Spring. His football team is the same as it has been for a few years. Our neighbor Sean is the coach and Ryan assists. Games this season were Tuesdays and Saturdays. Luckily Ryan was released from Young Men right when it was starting so he was able to attend the games and help coach.
Dylan enjoys football, and he's doing pretty well. There was an incident at one of the first games where a kid was not really playing fair (the whole team was a bit rough) and he hit Dylan really hard. Then at the end when they were high-fiving the other team, Dylan decided to smack him in the stomach instead of in the hand. None of us saw it, but the other coach (or maybe the kid's dad? or both?) kind of freaked out at Ryan saying that Dylan just hit his kid. I mean, it is a big deal when they're supposed to be showing good sportsmanship and their guard is down. It was a low blow. Dylan just has such a hard time letting things go and to him, that kid had wronged him. So anyway, we had a long talk about it. Dylan seems to be more mature and able to understand what we ask of him now. We told him the best way to get back at a dirty player is just to win, to play harder. That will make the kid madder than anything else. The rest of the season was good as far as that goes. We didn't win as many games this season as we have in the past for some reason, but the boys had fun. Now we have to decide if we let him play grid kid next year or not. Or if he will even want to with practice like four days a week. Or if there will even be a coach for his age. I guess we will cross that bridge when we get there.
We decided to try BYSL for all the kids this year. My thinking was that maybe Dylan and Sadie would be on the same night, saving us time. And there would be no Saturday games. Turns out they were on the same night, but back to back instead of at the same time. So that made for long nights. Especially since the weather in September was COLD. 90% of their games I had to bundle up and was freezing. So Dylan had soccer Monday and Wednesday (and football was Tuesday and Saturday so he was busy!)
We kind of missed Dylan's old coach and team. His team this time was okay, but not great. Close to the end of the season after a loss Dylan said, "I don't think we're ever going to win one." It makes it harder for sure. But he is a really great player! He was definitely top three on his team. At the beginning of the season he had this slide-kick that he kept doing, just running so hard at someone and then sliding into the ball, which put him on the ground. Not safe for anyone. We kept telling him to stay upright. He would say he was trying. I do think he was running pretty fast and it was hard to stop, but he has to learn. His coach pulled him out after like four of those and told him "you have to get your body under control." You can't just go throwing yourself around and tripping people or getting stomped on. By the end of the season he was able to stay up. He's got a lot of brute force and a good, strong kick. He just needs to fine-tune his ball handling skills and he could turn out to be real good I think.
The US soccer association (or whatever the official name is) decided to change the age groups starting this year. Instead of going by school year, it goes by calendar year. What that meant is that even though Sadie was barely in U5 last year, she jumped up to U8 this year. I found this out just before the season started. I was a little freaked out. Because Dylan had just moved up from U8 this year, and over at AYSO they play real seriously at U8- goalie, full field, the whole works. So picturing Sadie doing that was just crazy. She hadn't been all that excited to start anyway (though she had been going through a monster phase so she didn't really want to do anything.) So I was super nervous. Plus, her friend Brynlee has a January birthday, three months after Sadie, but that meant they were in different leagues. Sad! So she had no friends on her team. And she was playing with all kids born in 2009 and 2010. It turns out that BYSL U8 is pretty much the same as AYSO U6, so the field size and the rules and stuff didn't change. But there were a couple older kids that just dominated. They must've been close to two years older than her. It turned out okay, though. About halfway through the season she started asking her coach if she could play defense, and he let her. She is pretty good at it actually. She did score once too. She's pretty aggressive. Anyway, she asked to play defense because she didn't have to run as much. Here team won about half the games I would say. On one of the last games she was sitting with me in a blanket since she was the 'sub' and she was watching her team play and cheering for them (she's better at watching sports than any of our other children, she watches it with Ryan sometimes). She was cheering for specific kids and then saying things to me like, "she's really good, she's probably like the third best player." I already knew the kid who was their best player- the older kid. So I asked "who's the second best player then?" She looked at me like, duh, and said, "me." Lol, I love the confidence. She might be accurate. Though she's too small to really push her way through some of those big crowds, she's pretty focused and fast at kicking it. She's great at defense.
So Kylee's regular coach, Jamie, told us during the tournament in the early summer, that her and Joey (one of the girl's dad) were going to coach a team this year and told us to request Joey on our form. So I did. And I heard nothing from her. And we showed up at the little skills evaluation event and still had no idea. We saw Kaylie there, who also requested Joey. I texted Jamie and never heard back. Then weeks later I got an email from another lady saying she was our coach. I guess Joey backed out. I was annoyed, because I could've requested another coach that I knew was good. But the coach that she got (Helen Kenny) was really on top of things and worked hard with the girls and I think she did a good job. It's fun watching them now that they are in a more competitive league (U12) they call off-sides, and they are all just quite good! Kylee only had to play goalie once. Most of the time she was a mid, which suits her fine because she can't stand hanging back as forward when her defense needs help. But she's not the fastest runner, nor does she have the most endurance. So she will need to work on that in order to compete. She's decent with footwork. And she's certainly not scared and doesn't back down. She tried really hard to get a goal but never quite made it this season. We traveled to Pocatello twice and Rigby once and the rest of the games were in town. There were a couple teams that we just creamed. There were a couple teams that creamed us. And the rest were pretty evenly matched. She's now playing on an indoor team with most of the same girls, plus our neighbor Averi, whom Kylee is kind of obsessed with (I would say bff, but it's an off and on relationship. Anyway...)
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