Soccer Report 2

I had my first soccer game of the season last night with the 2nd and 3rd graded girls team I'm coaching. My daughter is one of the playes. The association that runs this league calls it micro soccer. The kids play three-on-three with no goalie on a very reduced field size. This keeps everyone playing. Every player gets lots of touches.

It's a fast game with lots of goals and everyone goes home tired. My goal is to get them to have fun playing soccer and teach them a few fundamentals that might stick.

We don't keep score. I'm sure some of those people who think we're ruining kids by not forcing them to compete wouldn't like that. I don't think the score is important, because we don't have refs so the game is not fair in the first place. The kids try to keep score anyway. It's funny to hear their numbers after the game. One girl told another the score was 12 to 2. I know I saw the other team put in at least 6 goals.

Another unique item of this league is that we split into two teams and play two games at the same time. I coached one game and the other coach took care of the other game. After the game, I asked one of the girls how it went in her game. She's very talented and seems pretty grown up so I was interested in her opinion. She said it went terrible. Why, I asked. She said it was because I'm a terrible coach.

I'll make sure to ask her each game and see what else she has to say. Is this her talking or her parents? Her father is an British guy who plays soccer, er correction, football and made sure I knew it on the first night.

This will be fun.