EnsworthSoccer

We've never sought to sandbag. If anything, the opposite.

This is crazy. http://www.lebanondemocrat.com/Soccer/2017/08/22/MJCA-coach-pulls-team-from-field-with-storm-approaching.html

What is CC's enrollment? I am under the impression that we are the smallest of the 14 D2-AA schools with 460 students (about 225 female). I could be wrong.

That Sean Fraser link is one of the better pieces about coaching philosophy that I have read.

The list is pretty small, except for in D1 AAA, where it is relatively large. In D2-AA, the smallest classification by number of schools, we get 15 from 11 schools. Both D1 AA/A and D2-A each get 15. In my opinion, that is a reasonable number. I believe that 45 girls from D1 AAA make all-state. I don't know if that is too many or not, but it is 3x the number of any other classification. By comparison, in North Carolina's public 4A classification (the largest in the state, with probably a much larger overall number of students enrolled than are in TN's D1 AAA) only 31 boys made all-state this fall. I am not a D1 AAA coach, so I have no dog in this fight, but I think the number we are afforded in our classification is reasonable - and given the number of high quality players we have - appropriate.

Just found out that it's not going to be a district. Chattanooga Christian just successfully appealed the TSSAA to drop down to D2-A for the next two years (would have been in a district with Baylor, McCallie, and GPS), so we now have a giant region that will take up 1/2 of our regular season games on the girls' side with the addition of St. Cecilia and Lipscomb to our original region.

Yeah, but they have the Moon Pie Festival in Bell Buckle. And probably good stock of RC Colas. And if you look up in the sky from there you can see Sewanee.

Depends on whether one organization or the other mandates that the kids can only play within that organization. ECNL currently does not have that policy, and the TSSAA currently allows kids to play ECNL. I worry about the fatigue factor from ECNL far more than SRPL, given the number of games. The girls will need to factor in what their overall goals are related to playing soccer. Their parents will need to be sensible. Playing both may be too much. USSDA has had the "club only, no school" policy since 2012. My former school in North Carolina had a few players who elected to play USSDA only. One of those ended up at UNC Chapel-Hill (now currently the leading scorer at Charlotte, currently ranked 4th in D1), but another ended up at a D3 mid-table school in the Liberty League. I have to wonder if giving up the last two years of high school soccer was worth it in order to play D3. We had others prior to 2012 who managed to play both USSDA and high school, including this guy: http://www.mlssoccer.com/players/jonathan-campbell Again, it's all about the players and their goals, unless an organization says "No". If that organization says "No" for the right reasons, such as being sincerely worried about over-training, then we will all learn to deal with it, I am sure.

I am confused completely, and I usually am not. I also am not a referee, though sometimes I pretend to be one from the sidelines during games. The link at bottom is a comparative analysis of the rules of the NFHS, NCAA, and FIFA conducted by some guys named Don and George with some pretty official-sounding referee titles. They were comparing the 2016-2017 rules of all 3 organizations to each other. On offsides, they indicate that there is no difference between the 3 sets of rules, and they reference a footnote that reads: "Footnote to the FIFA Offside Law 11 concerning interpretation of “INTERFERING†and “GAINING AN ADVANTAGEâ€. “Interfering with an Opponent†means preventing an opponent from playing or being able to play the ball by clearly obstructing the opponent’s line of vision or movement for challenging an opponent for the ball. “Gaining an Advantage†by being in an offside position means playing a ball that (1)rebounds or is deflected to him off the goal post, crossbar or an opponent; (2) that rebounds or is deflected to him from a deliberate save by an opponent; (3) receiving the ball from an opponent who deliberately plays the ball such as a miskick or misdirected header (except for a deliberate save), is not considered to have gained an advantage and is not offside." I think that last sentence is the key. There is no way I can or will coach my defenders not to try to play a ball that comes to them -- they probably wouldn't listen to me even if I tried. The rule puts them in a difficult position, but I guess it is one more way that the rules have been altered over the years to make it easier for teams to score. Anyway, here is the comparison: https://www.nfhs.org/media/1016876/2016-soccer-guide-interscholastic-revised.doc+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

We are on the other side of the park from you guys. You just have to be willing to walk through the scary woods to find us. The speed will graduate in May. I am not weird. Simply misunderstood.

I am sure they will.

We're playing DCA.

So will fans who want to have a seat at games that are not on the stadium field need to bring portable chairs (i.e., no bleachers)? Thanks in advance. We are on Field 1 on Friday.

Thank you.

Serious question - does anyone know how the fields look in general? (Prior to the rain). Do they drain well or not? Thanks for any insight.

I am sure we can set up a game -- it sounds like you all have a great grass field with real width. We don't have a concession stand at our soccer field, so you'd have to get him to microwave a bag before coming over to the field.

I certainly understand your point of view, and this is not meant to be argumentative. I am sort of new to coaching in Tennessee, and I don't have a lot of the personal coaching contacts that other coaches may have. Regarding the schedule, we arranged our first game for 2015 in late October 2014 when CPA approached us to play. We set that game up before we had even commenced region scheduling, which was probably the incorrect order of doing things. Following the region scheduling process, I sent out a mass e-mail in late winter / early spring asking for games using a list of coaches' emails provided by the referee assignor in Middle Tennessee. At the end of that scheduling process, I had exactly the number of replies that ended up filling our 16-game schedule (did not have to turn down anyone), and this was only after sending repeat mass e-mails just to get to that 16-game mark. I booked games as I received replies. We also responded to the invite from the Rivals Tournament, with the sole request that in one game we be allowed to play Hutchison, who traveled all the way to Nashville last year on a Saturday only to play 35 minutes before a lightning storm put a halt to things. The organizers at Rivals paired us with our second opponent. I explained in a post a few weeks ago why we went to Sycamore -- their first-year coach called me personally at the last minute and asked us to play in the tournament, as some earlier committed teams had dropped out. I understood his predicament, and I would hope that if we hosted a tournament and needed a last-minute fill-in, someone might step up. Maybe they wouldn't, who knows? I understand the value of playing tough games. I come from a classification in North Carolina that is fairly respectable (an understatement if ever there was one) when it comes to quality high school soccer. If there is a better way to get quality future out-of-region games other than e-mail solicitations, I am all ears.

Let me be clear - the physical play in the midfield was entirely that. Physical and mostly fair. But it was our final game before the current monster stretch that we are now in, and I had no desire to risk losing a player to any sort of preventable injury. We did try to cancel the game earlier in the week. In my estimation, playing possession in the middle third of the field would not have been wise. Our substitute players played over half of the game and were responsible for over half of the goals. In another thread (boys' soccer, I believe), I mentioned being on the losing end of a 20-0 score my first year of coaching, at a school that could barely field a team for games, much less practices. It provides a lot of perspective when you are in those situations. No matter what decision a coach on the winning side makes, that person is going to be second-guessed. My first priority in any situation is not to risk an injury. We did everything to avoid that. Then comes the tactical part - do you play short-handed, play possession, put in an impossible restriction, continue on as usual with the substitutes in, etc? I don't know the answer to that because each potential decision can come across as insulting to the opponent. But I do believe each team has an obligation to compete, including the losing team. When we lost that game 20-0, and when we lost 6-0 to Clarksville last season -- which would have easily been double that if not for our goalkeeper's efforts that night -- our teams competed until the end. We've talked as a team this week about last year's Clarksville game (we have 18 players back who were there that night, so nearly 90% of this year's team experienced it), and the girls pretty much laughed about it - we simply could not stop them in any way that night. For anyone who questions it, we have a good sense of humility about things, and we expect every game the rest of the way to be supremely difficult. We know very well what we are up against.

Fair question. Tough situation. They played a very high offsides trap the entire game, and they were not shy about hard challenges in the midfield. There's not much you can do in those situations. You've got to get the ball off your foot, and you've got to find a place to put the ball when you do that so someone else doesn't get hurt. There's no way to play possession in the middle third of the field with 20 bodies in there, unless you are willing to risk injury. And I am not going to risk injury for the sake of keeping the score down when the other team can make a simple adjustment to put some players deeper in behind the ball. I've coached over 300 high school games in nearly 20 years in North Carolina and Tennessee, and I can count on one hand the number of times my teams have scored over 9 goals in a game. I've seen a few "firsts" this season that have made it difficult to avoid scoring -- literally. I won't comment further on it.

Clarksville is at full strength after enduring several injuries in August. This will be a monumental test for us.

My guess (and I am not a club coach) is that with the rule in place, given the depth of the player pool in TN (based only on relative population to other R3 states and nothing else), it is a major challenge for clubs from TN to get a sense of certainty about which players will be available for such a competitive league, if we are talking about ECNL. It may also have some sort of impact on why no ECNL spot has been offered to a TN team. Again, I don't know, but since this is a forum for opinion, I am throwing it out there. If I worked with ECNL and was looking at TN, I would think that with the independent game participation rule gone, it would theoretically be easier for girls to commit to playing for their club team during the fall. Once they are past that hurdle, if they play ECNL and perceive that there is a benefit to doing so (there is, certainly), then it might be that they will decide to dedicate the entirety of their efforts towards playing for the club, making both the club and ECNL stronger. I think this will all become easier to handle when we reach the point that the girls are expected to either a) choose club or school but not both, or find clubs that are willing to work with high schools during the high school season. While the latter is a two-way street, I still believe it will be easier for the clubs to issue an expectation on a club-by-club basis than the TSSAA to do so. (And that emoticon that I can't get rid of happens when I put the letter "b" in front of the right parenthesis.)

I don't know that it is "private school" coaches. I'm one, and I know that I am steadfastly against the move to the spring. I have 4 players that have played SRPL this season, and 3 of them are underclassmen. It's a heck of a lot easier to find a way to work with the club coaches during the three or four fall weekend SRPL dates than MOVE AN ENTIRE SEASON. The independent game participation rule, while it may not be long for this world, seems to work okay in my opinion.

I don't think anyone knows the numbers for sure, if the independent game participation rule is abandoned. If that happens, it becomes very murky. Right now, only RPL and ODP have an exemption. That could be quantified with some certainty if someone had a bit of time. Throw out the independent game participation rule, and I imagine a lot of club teams will try to jump in, even those from clubs that have RPL teams (the non-RPL teams at those clubs). A lot of small clubs might make the effort to jump in. I have no problem with the kids being asked to make a choice. I think if does happen in Tennessee, history shows (in states with the DA) that it will come from the clubs. It makes so much more sense for the clubs to dictate an "us-or-them" policy than the schools. I mentioned in an email with some other high school coaches that in North Carolina there are four DA clubs that have mandated DA and no high school (really a USSF mandate nationally). That's about 200 boys not playing high school soccer in the fall. And from my colleagues back home, high school soccer is doing just fine. At the end of the day, what is best for the kids? And I wonder if all of us adults, with our various perspectives, really have a sense of that. For me, a kid getting injured because two adults see their interests as competing and not cooperative is the worst of all outcomes. We had 4 girls play in Florida over the Labor Day weekend, and you would have thought I was Grandma Jones (no disrespect to any Jones family members out there) the way I babied them afterward. "How are your legs?" "On a scale of 1-10, how sore are you?" etc., etc., with the selfish hope that they would reply "Great" and "10". They mainly just rolled their eyes at me. Go figure.