Two years ago I coached soccer for the first time. The Green Dragons finished 2nd (in a league of 3 teams) and never in history has there been a 2nd place coach who knew so little about the sport in which he/she was coaching. Until this year. That's right, I was asked (out of desperation, I assume) to coach again.
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| This is what first place looks like |
I certainly haven't gotten any smarter in the last couple years, and I absolutely haven't studied up on the sport, so I was pretty confident that my knowledge of soccer had significantly decreased. The good news? This season our league consisted of only 2 teams. Worst I could do was lead them to a silver. The bad news? Last time I coached I had an assistant who actually knew a lot about soccer, but not this round. It was just me and my White Sharks. Not a team name I chose, but I got outvoted. We played the Black Panthers every Wednesday. White Sharks vs. Black Panthers sounds more like a free speech rally that ends in tear gas and rubber bullets, so we didn't announce our team names too loudly. Thankfully, our matches were more civil.
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| Grady's team. Cooler colors, better coaches |
Etna soccer is a fluid sport. Not in the Brasilian sense that it's beautiful to watch, but in the sense that the rules, the length of the matches, hell, even the size of the field are all fluid and change on a weekly basis. We tried to add time to the matches every week as the players got in better shape, then subtracted time when it got too dark to play. The coaches doubled as refs, so I obviously relied heavily on the other coach to call just about everything except out of bounds; I was pretty good at that. And "hands," I called that one correctly at least 50% of the time.
But it was, once again, fun. I had Dylan on my team and she really took off as a team player this season. The Sharks had a blast (probably because I gave candy bars as rewards), and I learned nothing more about soccer. Our finally record? 3 - 3. That's right, 1st place, baby.
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