It’s Friday, that’s for sure.  I’m thankful that it’s Friday.  Looking back on this week, I cannot believe how the US men’s soccer team is playing lately.  Some reason (I’m not sure how) they are still in the world cup qualifier.  I guess it could be because some of the other teams are not very good.  But when I was watching the Costa Rica game, wow we looked horrible.  Now the Confederations Cup is moving forward and here we are sitting at 0-2.  We lost to Italy 1-3 and of course Italy is the World Champions so at least we scored right?  But what’s this…..   Egypt beats Italy yesterday 1-0.. oh boy that makes us look really good.    Also yesterday we lost to Brazil 0-3.  So here we are sitting in Group B in last place with 0 points and a -5 goal differential.

Sunday we play against Egypt.  I really hope these guys are resting or doing whatever they need to do to hopefully win something in this cup.  Rest, take their top diet pills, swim, I don’t know.  But they better figure it out.  Or this will be an embarrassing Confederations cup and a more embarrassing World Cup next year.

Last weekend my soccer team went to Abilene for a soccer tournament.  This was the last time this team would be the same as we are moving to a younger division and saying goodbye to the older division, so we wanted to have a last fun time together.

We really didn’t do very well as far as scoring but 2 of the games we almost won and played good.  Overall this last year was slow going and now that we have a few players off of the team, we are going to change up some things and really get competitive this year.  The girls only have a couple weeks till tryouts and I hope we can pick up a few more players to round out the roster.

So here we are in Abilene, TX for our last tournament of the season.  Next season we are moving down to a 96 team instead of a 95 team.  We have played up the entire year.  So we just finished our first game and wow, the girls we played against were really good.  We played OK, but they won.  They had 2 girls that were like 5′10″.  They must have used their best diet supplements, cause they were in shape.

I lost count but I think the final was 0-8.  The other team had about 5 of these players that were on the ODP team.  ODP is the Olympic Develoment program. So it was tough.  Next game is in a little over 2 hours.  I hope we fair better in that one.

We have been preparing for this weekend’s tournament.  We thought it would be fun to have a season ending tournament.  So we said what the heck and entered our team in.  Most tournaments we had played this past season, yielded a minimum of 3 games.  Usually one Friday night and 2 Saturday or 2 Saturday and 1 Sunday.  Well this one is slightly different.

We got our schedule a couple days ago and then they changed it yesterday so we now have 3 games on Saturday and 1 on Sunday.  Then if we are in the top 2 we play a fifth game Sunday afternoon.

Either way we finish up, we should all have fun this weekend.

After watching this video I guess there is a new meaning to standing to close.  I will need to make sure to tell my players not to ever stand this close to a throw in.

found at: http://onthepitch.org/blog/

Saturday was quite the long day.  But if you ask me, I will say it was worth it.

Saturday morning started off by driving over to my friends house as we were going to drive up to the airport together.  We got to Dallas Love Field around 12:15pm as we had to get through security.  Our Charter plane (by Southwest Airlines) took off about 2pm and it was a somewhat short flight and we got there about 3:45pm.

Once we hit the ground there were 3 tour buses ready to pick us up.  Once we all boarded we were off to Iowa State University.  I think we got to the stadium about 5pm (1 hour prior to kickoff) and walked around and took some pictures.  Of course the game started shortly after that and it was a good football game.  Go Aggies!  Texas A&M won 49-35.  After the game we headed back to the buses were we had to wait up to 45 minutes to get everyone back on board to make our way back to the Airport in Des Moines.  Once we arrived at the airport we had to all go through security again (which seemed to take forever) and once we were aboard the Southwest Pilots got us home in quick fashion.  We landed back in Dallas about 1:45am, and we drove back to my friends house, picked up my car and drove home.  I got to bed about 3:15am.

It was a very, very long day, but one I hope to remember forever.

Sooner Mazzie Dog is suited up watching the game..

Go SOONERS…!!!!

Last score was 21-17 with a few minutes left in the 1st half…

The 2008 Red River Rivalry.  (I still like Red River Shootout better)

Game takes place tomorrow in Dallas @ the Cotton Bowl around 11am cst.

Of course most will know that I will be cheering for Oklahoma and they better win and keep their #1 ranking in the country.  However, I do believe they will win tomorrow and go on to the National Championship this year…

Go Sooners..

During some parts of the year we have to recruit or find players to join our soccer team so we can keep improving through out the year, etc.  One thing we did this year was to get business cards done with our club logo, team name, and our coaching info.  One idea that we can use for next year would be promotional pens.

We could get our club logo on them and our phone number and we could hand them out with our business cards.  Then when open workouts and tryouts come around they can remember our team name year round.  We will have to double check in to this and put this plan into action for next year.  Hopefully using this method might increase our tryout rate by two or three times the amount from last year.

So Ike came close to us today.  We pretty much saw some rain and some good gusts of wind but that was pretty much it.  However down South by the coast, most not so lucky.

They canceled our soccer game today but not until we drove up there, walked to the field and got rained on.  They did cancel some games last night, so the question really is..  Why didn’t you just cancel all the games this weekend instead of some and make people drive up there this morning and waste time and gas.  Oh well..  Just had a nice day of no soccer and I got to work on the office some more and watch tons of hurricane news coverage.  Now just watching the OU Sooners play my home town University of Washington…

Go Sooners..!!

How is your Saturday going?  or how was your Saturday?