Another Soccer Season

 This soccer season flew by! I feel like we barely started and we already had our last game yesterday. Granted, there were two games last weekend and no games were postponed due to weather, so we just consistently held games from the beginning of September until yesterday and now we're done. 

It was a little bit of a different season since we were pushed up an age group, as I previously explained, and had some new players. One of the new players lives near us and needed a carpool, so another parent and I volunteered which turned out so well! I definitely needed the help myself with all the things going on at our house and I was happy to help another family out. We learned that the other family who volunteered to help lives in our very neighborhood, so that didn't complicate the carpool at all. Their son has only been on the team a couple seasons and is a grade above Erik, plus attends a different school, which is why we never knew he lives 2 minutes away from us. 

We played 8 games this season. We lost the first 2, they were small losses, like by only a few points, then blew the next 5 out of the water, like beating them by 8-12 points! We lost our last game by 3 points. However, all of our losses were still great games and I think the boys learned a lot from them. Yesterday, it was unfortunate that we only had 1 sub, and then two boys actually had to leave early at the very end of the game, so we had no subs! The refs played both teams down though, so we didn't have one less player than the other team. They were a tough team yesterday and definitely one of the older ones. 

At this stage of soccer, it seems most of the really serious kids move on to travel teams, so it's hit or miss what kind of team you'll play. We noticed that most of the teams aren't great and some of those games got downright boring because we were beating them so badly. Then there are a few teams that were really good and more serious like our team is and the games were exciting. I'm interested to see what the spring season will bring. Go Sharks!

All my pics are of him on D, none in the goal. Most of the games didn't have much action for the goalies since 5 of the teams didn't score on us. Some of them didn't even cross over midfield!

Erik's cross country training helped with his endurance.

He's not afraid to get in there and intercept the ball.

And at one of his games last weekend, he got hit by the ball in the face and got a bloody nose. As soon as he was done bleeding, he was back in the game! (He also got shoved down by an opposing player, which was kind of funny because it didn't even phase him!)