A Weekend to Savor

Mark Schatz and I started thinking about starting a Lady Flyers U-11 team back in the early Spring. Both of our daughters would be graduating out of JAWS Academy in the fall. Our only choices were to have them play recreational soccer or join a current club team with a professional coach. Both of us really didn't want to give up coaching. We enjoyed it and we thought we were pretty good. Most of all we didn't want to give up the experience of being with our daughters. We kicked around the idea of stating our own travel team for several weeks before we finally decided to commit to it. We really didn't know what we were getting into at the time. I called everyone I knew to try to get some advice on how to go about it. Doug Sena with JAWS has provided allot of help and encouragement. Paul Marshall of the U-13 Lady Flyers provided invaluable guidance on everything from team uniforms to scheduling.

After the Academy soccer season, was over, we decided to jump in with both feet and create a team. We started out small. After Memorial Day weekend, we began hosting Saturday soccer games for whoever wanted to come out to the field. Surprisingly, we had about 12-15 kids come out each Saturday. Finally, on July 14 we formed a team of 10 girls and started formal training. For 2 months we practiced and worked, even on 105 degree days in August. We also ordered uniforms, built a web site, registered players, applied to tournaments, reserved hotel rooms and basically did everything we needed to do to set up and run a team.

We finally started our first tournament game this weekend. You always hope that all of the work you put into something like this pays off but you never can be sure. We'd never played at this level so we didn't know what to expect. We just did our very best to prepare our team. Our first match of the tournament was against a very good JSC Lady wolves team. They had beaten us 3-1 just a couple of weeks before with 2 of their better players out of the lineup. Unbelievably we came out with a 3-1 win. It was a sweet victory and affirmation of everything we have worked for. That final whistle was the sweetest music I've heard in a long time

I hope that this won't be our last victory but I can almost guarantee that there will be few as sweet as this one. It was a relief to know that our kids were as talented as anyone and we could put a team together that could compete and win.