Guest poster Dan here. I wanted to write something about Scott’s soccer game this morning but it just seemed to make sense over here on this blog.

So, to back up a bit, Scott has been playing soccer for about a season and a half. He played spring soccer and is about half way through the fall season. Not only has his team never won, it was only 2 weeks ago that I actually saw them score a goal. Last week we lost 5-0 and that’s a fairly regular occurrence.

A few months ago I was talking to a co-worker and telling him about how my son was playing soccer and he asked what position he played and I was like “uhhh yeah it doesn’t really matter….” Essentially they run around in packs following the ball. Though I can definitely tell that they’re getting better from when they started earlier in the year.

For the spring season, he was in the Under-8 league having missed the cutoff (for being in U-6) by a week. As you can imagine, there is a ton of difference between a barely 6 year old and an almost 8 year old. Complicating this is the fact that this is Scott’s first year while many of these other kids have been playing for a year or two and/or have older brothers who have been playing with them for awhile. At this age, it really only takes one kid on a team who knows what they’re doing to make a HUGE difference.

So anyways, today we played a team over in Indian Hill. They are Madeira’s “rivals” and are also the wealthiest suburb of Cincinnati (by far). I don’t want to make fun of the kids there because you know they are only 6 or so but one of them was apparently named “Rooster”. We had a parent near us who kept cheering on (I assume their son) Rooster. Carolyn wondered if perhaps it was a nickname, but he also kept calling him “Roo”. So it’s like why would you have a nickname for a nickname? The only other kid’s name I heard was “Miller” which you know was kind of confusing for us . For the record, “Rooster” was definitely the best player on their team.

During the first quarter, we kept having the ball over on their end of the field. Like I was saying, this was exciting since even a shot on goal is something for us!

One of the major problems our team has is lack of follow-up on the ball. Like, they will kick the ball and then just stand there, rather than kicking the ball and then running to go get it. Scott also has a problem with this but he’s actually better than many of the other boys on the team.

Midway through the 2nd quarter, Scott had rotated up to offense. We had the ball down on their end some more and there was just a large scrum of people in front of the goal. I couldn’t see exactly what happened, but I saw the ball get to Scott. He hasn’t quite figured out how to plant his foot and kick the ball, but instead he has this sort of galloping kick where he kind of gallops up to the ball and then kicks it. So the ball comes to him, and he does his little gallop-kick and it goes in the goal!!!!!!!!! Afterwards one of the other boys on his team came up to him and lifted him up in celebration (very cute / funny)

During the 2nd half, you could definitely see where our boys were tired and the ball was down on our end quite a bit more. We were all on pins and needles every time the ball got near our goal but our goalie(s) made several good saves and eventually the game was over and we won, 1-0!!! Scott was the big hero!

Afterwards we found out that the other team’s name was the Stormtroopers. Considering that our team is called the Jedis, was it any surprise that we won?

We didn’t have our camera with us, but here are some shots that I took of him a few weeks ago because I’m too cheap to pay $12.99 or whatever to the picture company.