Coach Flip Naumburg's Journal

Sunday, February 26, 2006

SUNDAY SERMON

Losing never gets any easier for me, and this one was a stinger, but I'm ready to move on.  I think the players often feel the ache of losing all at once, right after the game.  With me as coach it often gets worse as the night goes on.  Losing seems to like to actually eat me. 

The light of a new day doesn't make it feel that much better either.

At first after the loss I kept asking myself what I might have done, adjustment wise, not so much motivation wise, to have changed the outcome.  There was a short period of time in the fourth quarter when I felt like I had absolutely no control over all that was taking place right in front of my eyes.  I hated this feeling big time.  I also fear and loath not having solid answers for problems that other teams give us, and I didn't seem to have any good ones for the 'poetry' coming at us in that later stage Saturday, and even if I had we could not get a call from an official, we couldn't get the ball, and I had no timeout in my pocket to use either.

THEY'RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY

The four final goals for Whittier that first caught and then closed us out were all unassisted, mostly close range dunks created off of their very effective invert offense where they put midfielders behind the cage for a variety of pretty good reasons.  Inversely, the attackers go up towards the midfield.  It is at times effective to be sure.  In my mind, though, that (5 goals in 7 minutes) can't happen to us because we play solid team defense and our concepts won't allow that to happen.  We've played against lots of inverts, but then again, THIS team hasn't yet, so anyway FIX IT!  Okay, I'm working on it.

FISHING FOR POLES

Right now I am not happy with the overall rotation of our long poles.  We have several good ones and I'm not using them correctly yet.  We've had but two games, and truthfully I/we have sort of yinged the poles one game, and then we yanged them in the other one.  Neither one is quite right as I search for 'happy medium'.

The many good long stick players we have can give us depth if I do this thing right at some future point.  We will need deepness not only to survive, but in my estimation of this team, also in order to succeed.

A FOR EFFORT

Our effort was great all weekend, and I guess by that I mean on and off the field as well.  I love to watch this group work together.  When they get it going it's allotta fun to watch.  They get after it.

We are a spunky bunch.  We have a midfield line called 'The Kids".  Now that's nice, and I did not even come up with the name (did I?).  I need to use our depth on midfield better than I have so far, and that will entail using more kids (young/first year here players) as well.

The team took to the business trip concept pretty well, and in spite of the fact that we return home 1-1 in the old win-loss column this was an important, good, and even fun trip for us all.  This is all good because we turn around and go back to California (Sonoma State #1) in less than two weeks..

ONWARD AND UPWARD

We have Colorado College this Saturday, another Division III team.  This kind of tough opponent will be our challenge week in and week out this season.  What the heck, let's just have every game all season be a playoff intensity type of game.

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