6 May Enter...But Only 1 Will Leave

Pre-season Friendlies today, effectively kicking off our competitive season.

Last summer I had been talking with Phil at St Croix about bringing some teams in the weekend of Aug 28 for some friendlies. We had thought about reaching out to some stronger 08/09 teams in the area, and even had some interest from a Regional ECNL team out of Iowa to come up.

That Iowa team starts their league competition next weekend, so they were out. They are interested in playing a number of times this winter, so I’m sure we’ll make that happen.

I reached out to Kari with the Prior Lake 08s. They were interested but were heading on a team camping trip that weekend. Sounds like a super fun team bonding experience for sure!

Lawerence with Tonka Fusion Elite 09 wasn’t interested. They will likely be St Croix’s toughest competition this year in their league, but I sensed a hesitancy on his part to play us for whatever reason. Maybe I was just reading things wrong though.

Dragan at Boreal had reached out to us in the summer looking for a match up, and Edi at Manitou was interested when I brought the idea up to him at an event at NSC in June when we matched up against his 08 girls in the All-American Cup Final.

Boreal and Manitou had their 09 teams playing 11v11 in that event (along with the Iowa team), so it made sense that they’d all have some interest to try and make things work.

I wanted to host these at AHA, but due to a conflict with the Boreal team playing on Aug 28, the coaches collectively decided to move the friendlies to Aug 21 and play them up in Andover (Boreal’s facilities).

My goal today is simple - get the girls playing together as much as possible as early as possible, help them get more and more comfortable with each other, and give me an opportunity to see where we’re at.

We’ll face a challenge early on…

I know the 6 new players to the team are going to be nervous today, and I knew well in advance that I’m going to start all of them our first game.

I built the schedule for the day and made sure we played St Croix first as they should be the most competitive group out there today for us.

I’m going to put the team in a 4-3-3 right off the bat - a formation that they have never played.

With 6 new players from 5 different teams last year (Val and JB from Salvo, Emma from Boreal, Mackey from Eclipse, Toni from Tonka, and AC from Lakeville), that means the starting lineup will be made up of players from 6 different clubs (when you include MTA) and matching up versus an athletic St Croix team who is hungry to prove their worth against us.

For sure could be a recipe for disaster early on, and honestly we may give up a goal or two early on, but I don’t really care about the score and prefer to throw players into challenges right away to test their mettle.

No idea how things will go.

But I do know this…

Though I’ve tried to build bonds between the players with preseason meetings, online sessions, and a couple field sessions, we’ll still be showing up this morning for our 9AM game as a collection of players from 6 different clubs.

With that said, in my experience, the competition, adversity/challenge, and success which I’m certain we’ll all see today will bind things together nicely. Regardless of the game outcomes, we’ll leave Pine Hills North Park as one team.

Guaranteed.