Thursday, December 6, 2007

BREAK ON THROUGH

I just got back from the Edge and from what I consider to be a very important practice that we had tonight.  I might call it a ‘breakthrough’ practice, one that started to bust up the ball of puss that I had been brewing on that artificial turf over there.

There has been something wrong with our offensive chemistry all fall.  I hadn’t been able to break the chain of events very well either.  Tonight I had both coaches taking the burden of creating more offensive punch at the same time, and I had even tried to start the mental process of being more offensive with everyone via an email I had sent earlier in the day.

The offensive burden was becoming a large rock I couldn’t roll up the hill anymore, or something like that.  I was worried about our future, and especially because of where we are on the calendar.  We have only two more practices before Christmas break, the ones next week, and the kids have exams seriously coming up so those practices might be smaller in numbers or whatever.

Even so we are not the team playing in the Edge that we will be in 2008 as many do not come and a few are in Katmandu or whatever until next semester, but that don’t confront me because I still feel this tremendous urgency that the path of our offensive track needs to be laid down before we would be able to move on.  I don't need individuals, but rather a team to accomplish my plan.

Overall we hadn’t improved much in a while, and offensively in 6v6 situations not at all.

IT'S AVAILABLE ON 'SAME PAGE'

Someone watching from the outside might ask what was so breakthrough about the practice just witnessed.  To the naked eye it might have looked like any other I might lord over. I had my usual tantrum about catching and throwing, but to my fuzzy, totally half-blind eye it was, in retrospect, inspiring and uplifting.  We did some tweaking and began to change the actual structure of our offensive thought and function tonight and now I can see the glimmer of hope that I needed to take on Christmas ‘vacation’ with me.  Now, I can go about brooding about it all for a couple months in a good way and not a panicky one. 

We still have the two more sessions, too, and even though the players won’t all be present, I feel confident that we can finally return to that process of getting better as a team, which can be and has been so fleeting for us lately.

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