Another season begins
This weekend we had our first game for the fall 2007 AYSO soccer season. Once again, I’m coaching, this year in the U12 Girls division. It’s an interesting change, as in Palo Alto there is no U11 league, it goes from U10 to U12 as the kids start shifting into different sports and activities and the player pool shrinks a little.
The field is much bigger, it’s 9v9 rather than 7v7, and the size of the field places a greater emphasis on team play compared with the younger leagues. In AYSO, the philosophy is “everyone plays” and an attempt is made to create balanced teams. However, in the younger brackets, a single strong player can easily overrun most other teams that don’t play for field position, partly because the fields are small and there’s tendency for the game to turn into a roaming swarm around the ball. This year in U12, with the larger field and more players on the field, team play becomes much more important. In this weekend’s game, we nominally won the game 2-1. The first goal was a random bounce which I think actually got tipped in by the opposing team’s keeper, but the second one was a very nice play in which the defense returned the ball to our midfield, which ran the ball upfield and passed to one of the forwards who scored. Even better, everyone stayed spread out in good field positions.
It would be nice to claim that this was partly from the efforts of our fine coaching staff, but the girls ran the play off on their own. It was fun to watch, though.
Tags: kids, sports, soccer, ayso, coaching
