Welcome to any and all readers!

My name is Mark Abboud (my friends call me Loki) and I coach my daughter Livi’s Minnesota Thunder Academy (MTA) 2009G ECNL team. This will be my 4th year coaching the team (having started with them at the U10 age group in 2018) and the 4th team that I’ve taken from their U10 to U13 years since 2001.

My goal here is to document our first year of competition in the Elite Clubs National League (ECNL), a national league comprised of 110+ of the most competitive youth soccer clubs in the country.

You can read more about how the Minnesota Thunder Academy got started here, but suffice it to say that it was years of personal blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice to eventually help bring this magnet club to life.

But with that said, I don't think I can convey to anyone how completely worth it all that work feels today and how thankful I am to the directors and leaders who have made the organization what it is today...now that I have a daughter who has found pure joy in the club's development environment.

It's like everything I went through between 2003 and 2008 was for her...before she even took her first steps.

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IMPORTANT NOTE - This website is primarily for the girls on the team - an educational reference for them to look back on as needed, and a place for us all to collect and reflect on memories of our time together. For any who manage to stumble across this site and take interest in a coach’s perspective of things, I hope you find things informative, enlightening, and entertaining.

DISCLAIMER #1 - Any thoughts here are my own and don’t necessarily represent the views of this team’s parent group, other MTA coaches/staff, our club as a whole, or the ECNL itself.

DISCLAIMER #2 - I reserve the right to type as fast as I want and not proofread anything, misplace modifiers, dangle participles, run on sentences, disagree pronouns, over-use commas, and make other seemingly basic grammatical errors at will. I will also likely go off on nonsensical stream-of-conscious, tangential and erratic rants that may never seem to resolve into anything that has anything to do with what I started talking about in the first place.

You’ve been warned.