Another Soccer Season Begins

Sam's first soccer game was Saturday morning. This is his 5th year of playing two seasons a year, fall and spring. He started when he was just turning four in the middle of the season, and he has really some a long way. Especially when you consider he spent a lot of time that first season hanging from the bars of the soccer goal - yes, during the games too. Saturday I thought, "Boy, Sam is playing a team with some very big kids on it," and then I realized that Sam is that big, too. I am just used to seeing little boys playing soccer, but he is growing up.

This year we had to decide if we wanted to keep Sam in a recreational league, or look into moving him up into a more competitive traveling league. The traveling leagues can be unorganized, expensive, and are a much bigger time commitment. However, the recreational leagues are still coached by Dad of the payers, some of which have very little, if any, soccer playing experience themselves. And if Sam wants to be a competitive soccer player, we wonder if we need to move him into another league for some more experienced coaching. But we decided not to for this year, mainly because we just didn't know if we could swing that kind of schedule in the fall with Ben's working schedule, and also because Sam is still young, and we were not sure if his heart is completely into soccer - he didn't seem to enjoy it much last spring. But he very much wanted to play this fall.

Saturday he had his best game ever. He scored one of his team's three goals, and he showed his experience throughout the game. His brain was in the game, and he made some good decisions, passed to teammates, and just had some really good plays. Ben's favorite was when he had a throw-in and waited patiently until a teammate ran down the sideline, giving him the perfect person to pass to. My favorite was when he jumped up to block a pass from the other team with his chest, and then took the ball when it landed at his feet. He ended up playing defense a lot of the time, but didn't get bored or inattentive when he wasn't right with the ball. And his team gave up three goals (and didn't score any) during the third quarter when Sam was not in the game.

Needless to say we were very impressed. And we think we made the right call on which league to play in, since he seemed pretty evenly matched with most of the other boys. It would have been nice if we had pictures or video of any of this, but we didn't bring our camera to this game (it started at 8:45 - we're lucky we all got there on time). Hopefully we'll get some on film next week.