It was cold, but at least it didn’t rain. We won our scrimmage last night against William & Mary 4:2. David Bulow, who arrived the night before after driving two days from Colorado and sleeping on a couch for a couple of hours, scored twice and assisted one. Deli also had two goals and one assist. Offensively we looked much better than in the game against Longwood. With a bit more effectiveness in front of the goal, we could have scored a couple more. Defensively I think we looked not so good. Some miscommunication and a very good forward in #14 Alan Koger made our life harder than it should have been.

The starting lineup was Mark-Evan,Henry,Kelvin,Me-Burke,Gerson,Luke,Ben-Deli,David.
In the second half a cold sicken Burke was replaced by Pat. I did something to my ankle and got replaced by Ross. Fakundo and Kofi in Midfield and Rosi as a forward also saw some playing time.

Regarding player notes, Fabian Dawkins flew into Richmond last night and will join us. It is confirmed that Eliot Paschalis will not come back for another season and might retire from professional soccer.

On a side note, my U9 teams Kickers Central ManU and Kickers Central Liverpool played each other yesterday afternoon. There is a lot of trash talking involved in the days leading to the game. Best trash talker goes this time to a 7-year old Liverpool player who ran around during warm-up yesterday calling all ManU players Man-Poo. Creative!

Last weekend my U11 Boys and U14 Girls teams traveled to Stafford to play in SASA’s St. Patrick’s Day Tournament. For coaches or parents interested in the tournament, here is a small review.

Fields
No complains from my side. The two complexes I played at, Colonial Forge HS and Dixon Park, were in superb conditions. The grass was short, no bumps anywhere. That definitely helped in a preseason tournament, when some of the touches are not that defined yet. I heard from other coaches though, that some fields at other locations were in very bad conditions (Willowmere Park and Pratt Park).

Referees
Again, no complains. The referees were what referees are at the youth level. Some were very good, some not so good. Some experienced and talkative to the young players, some very young and insecure about making any call. My favorite referee moment was our last U14 game, when the linesman on our side announced every sub with a loud “The white team would like a substitution, please!” to the referee. He said that roundabout 20 times in the game. I thought it was nice. Some of my girls thought it was annoying

Scheduling
This is a very important topic to me. Going with two teams to a tournament is always difficult regarding scheduling conflicts. I help creating the Kickers Youth Tournaments schedules and know how hard it is to make it work out, so that everybody is pleased. I let the tournament director know way in advance about my situation. However, my teams ended up playing at different locations (25 minutes away from each other) and at not favorable time slots. They were scheduled back to back on Saturday morning, which made me miss 20 minutes of my girls game because of the travel. On Saturday afternoon, they were scheduled at the exact same time, so I had to miss my boys game completely. On Sunday morning then they were scheduled back to back again, which made me miss the first 20 minutes of my girls game. I know its hard to do a schedule, but also feel that some of those scheduling conflicts could have been avoided. Only with the help of some very nice parents (Thanks Dan and Paul) I was able to manage those conflicts.

Overall, the proximity and the great fields are a big plus for me and I will definitely consider going there again. However, the scheduling was not done in favor of multi team coaches and I will this time probably take only one team.