DCA,
Indeed, I agree that you deserve props for your victory. I know how gratifying it feels when you knock off a ranked opponent in a higher classification. I wasn't trying to take anything away from you guys. As far as a number is concerned I'm afraid I don't have one. I actually coach the JV team. As far as missing players, that's one thing that us smaller schools have to deal with more often than the larger schools. We were missing one of our starting fullbacks who was still tied up with wrestling. In addition our keeper, (jerbaber), had only been out to practice one day before the tournament since he was tied up with basketball. Also, and I'm not making excuses for our players but, we have only had the goals on our field for week. We had been shooting on PUG nets for the last few weeks while we waited for our goals to be rewelded and repainted by the Ag dept. (go ahead and give us a nomination for the redneck league for that one!) As your goalie alluded to earlier, all of our shots were right at the keeper (as they were as well in the Emerald game) which probably has more to do with the fact that we've been shooting on a small centralized target for the majority of our practices this spring.
One of the nice things about preseason tournaments is it gives us an opportunity to see what we need to work on and then at the end of the year you can look back and see how far you've come. We played in the spring valley preseason tournament last year and while the competition was higher I feel that this year playing in Emerald's tournament might provide for a better measure of growth. We obviously were hoping for better results this weekend but at least playing against schools the same size (or nearly in your case) is probably a more accurate prediction of where we currently are. We have some issues which need to be worked out but I feel that by the end of the year we'll be a far better team than what we displayed this past weekend.
Good luck to you in 1A this upcoming year. I look forward to playing you guys again later this spring and seeing how far both teams have come.
