Game On

Hey friends, Saturday and Sunday past yielded an interesting turn of events in the Copeland sports world. Saturday, Soccer Chick and her girls, with Coach The Hub in tow, headed out to what should have been an easy win. Our girls dominated the entire game. The. Entire. Game. I just can't write it in a way that will sufficiently satisfy the frustration behind this one. Our girls were on their game, passing, shifting, turning. I don't actually know what any of that means, in fact, I just wrote what sounded good. Truth is, though, the girls played great. This was a great soccer game to watch. Lots of action, fierce defense and incredible offense. Somehow our girls made over 7 attempts (I stopped counting at 7) and couldn't connect any of them to net. We were too wide, too high, blocked by the goalie's over-sized hands. Just couldn't make a goal. Yet, we spent three quarters of our playing time in their zone.

Somewhere after halftime I had a thought. How tragic would it be if this team made a goal by accident and won this game? When our girls are playing like this? That would be a robbery. Friends, we were robbed. At gunpoint. By blind people with water pistols. It was that bad. The opposing team tapped the ball and it went straight to our goalie's hands, bounced off her hands and rolled under her legs into the goal. Alright, not the definition by accident, but NOT worked for. You know what I mean. You've watched some sort of sports game where your team was working its butt off only to get handed a defeat to a team not half as good. That was our Saturday story. The girls lost 2-1.

In all fairness, our girls had a goal that the sideline ref called a goal. Raised her pretty little flag to signal it was a goal. The ball bounced off the girl's gloves and crossed the goal line. Yet, our head ref said no goal. After a brief conference, and apparent talking-to, the senior ref announced...no goal. Now, that was robbery. This absolutely should have been a tie-game. It should have been a landslide in our favor, but I digress. Nevertheless, for some odd reason Mr. Senior Ref called our goal a no goal. Unbelievable. I mean, everyone on the sidelines was cheering, you could see the disappointment on the parents' faces across the field. We all agreed it was a goal. Why couldn't they?

We moved on to a makeup game on Sunday...only to have the opposing team be a no-show. The girls were a bit disappointed but they quickly got over it by an impromptu parent/sibling vs. soccer girls game. We enjoyed a few minutes of this spectacle with shoes flying in the air, fancy footwork, coaches falling, headers gone wild and girls squealing everywhere. Much fun.

We ended our weekend sports with Oldest's basketball game. Our boys didn't win, but Oldest has really developed into a rebound king. He's actually gotten to be quite amazing. He's getting crazy rebounds all over the place. Picture my 6 foot, slimmed down 170lb 17 year old, nothing but muscles for days. Jumping, diving, connecting...He's doing great. Great fun to watch. We keep telling him to go up and take the shot. Too much pressure, he says. Gotta love the boy. No matter how big he gets, he's still a big old teddy bear. Shy, quiet and reserved.

Our soccer girls have two games left before the season-end tournament weekend. Bball Girl gets to attend a summer basketball camp that she's thrilled about. We'll have some quiet weeks while they enjoy their summer and we send Oldest off to college. Sigh. Then we'll be back in the swing of things for the fall.