Dance, Dance Christ Paffgen

What a weekend. It turned out to be quite the time in terms of soccer for me this past weekend, with my middle school teams tournament going on, as well as the rec league team that I play for playing for the division championship for the spring season. We'll start with the middle school teams.

Saturday began bright and early at 7 am for the first B team game. Given that the schedule had put both of our teams playing at the exact same time for all 3 games in the group, we had to split up coaching duties, with two of us at the B team, and one at the A team. We would then rotate through the games in order to have each of us be at at least one of each teams games. Our B team played well, although they ended up losing 3-0 on 2 fluke goals. We also missed at least a half dozen chances to score ourselves. It really could have gone either way. During this game, the A team dismantled their opponent 4-0. Not a bad showing for a team that hadn't scored more than 2 goals in a game all year.

The afternoon game put me at the A team game. We were playing the winner of the morning game, so essentially this game was going to decide who would go to the championship game on Sunday afternoon. We were tied 0-0 after the first half. The other team had had a goal called back for a foul, which led to a quite humorous bit of yelling from the opposing team's coach. Now, anyone that knows soccer knows that when a foul is called by an assistant referee (linesman) , that the center official doesn't always see the call right away. This happened in the build up to the play, they scored, and then the ref saw the linesman with his flag off. He waved the goal off and gave us the free-kick. This led the over-weight "coach" of the other team to march out on to the field and start screaming at the referee that he had to play the advantage since they had scored a goal and that he couldn't go back and take the goal away. If the coach knew anything about soccer, he would know that there are goals called back all the time for offside, and that it is perfectly within the rules of the game to call a play back after the fact when he didn't see the flag right away. At any rate, the coach yelled for about 5 minutes ranting and raving...he just needs to read the rules. In the end, we won the game 2-1 on 2 excellent goals for my team and 1 spectacular shot from their team.

The third game Sunday turned out to be meaningless for both teams. The A team was already going to be in the championship game due to favorable results in the afternoon, while the B team was eliminated based on having lost their second game 3-1. The championship game was played well, and we ended up winning 1-0 on a great goal from one of our star mid-fielders. I have to say that it was quite exciting to be able to coach these kids and win a championship of sorts at the end of the season with them. They even decided to dump water and ice all over us after the game while we were celebrating. All in all, it had been a blast coaching the kids and just having some fun with the game of soccer.

As for my rec league team that I play on, we ended up winning the game 2-1 on a golden goal in overtime, although I wasn't able to play due to a freak neck-problem that kept me from hardly being able to walk most of Sunday. I still don't really know what was up with it, but it was like I had slept on it wrong, but about 20 times worse. I hadn't really ever felt anything like it. But that's how it goes sometimes I guess.

At any rate, I was a part of 2 championship teams this past weekend, which is really quite spectacular. I would have to say, however, that the one for the middle school team was the more satisfying of the two. And not just because I couldn't play in the game for my team, but just because it was great seeing the team work together and see how badly they all wanted to win. The happiness that they all had and just the fact that everyone came together over the weekend to play hard and work hard made it seem like the more special achievement of the two. Maybe this coaching thing wouldn't be so bad after all...