There is a story of a little boy who comes home, shirt ripped! Nose bloody! Hair all a mess and a bright shiny black left eye beginning to show. His mother distraught and worried starts to coddle him and asks who beat you up? Who gave you that black eye? The boy does not hesitate in the least, puffs out his chest, smiles to reveal a missing tooth and with great enthusiasm and gratification announces to his mother and the rest of the bridge group gathered there at the house for their weekly game “No one GAVE me this black eye! I EARNED it!”
It really was a great season for my Lady Bengals this past year. Our goals were to make it to the third round of the playoffs this year- one better than last year-which we did- and to finished the season as a ranked team (That we are waiting on to see although I think we have made a pretty good argument for ourselves 3 of these last 4 games.) We developed incredibly over the season as a team playing a schedule that I believe will prove to have been tougher than anyone else in our region, our RD2 sister schools, or most other schools in the state. We lost some games we probably could/should have won, played well in some, ok in others, and poorly in a few. The ladies beat two different #15 teams as well as #5 and only lost to #3 by one goal. The Riverside game was I believe a combination of so much adrenaline draining soccer in three days, a little injury trouble, and an admittedly poor job by myself to get the girls ready and “up” for the game. We played over 200 minutes of hard nose soccer Monday and Wednesday to earn our way into the third round this year. The huge for us win over Dreher just left us drained and tired. I know the newspaper reported 20+ shots by Dreher to a few for us which implies a “lucky” win for us but I must come out of my normal form and rebuke that assumption just a bit. Many of the shots- Most of the “shots” recorded were long range, off frame, blasts that were aimed in the general direction of the goal. The number of shots versus the number of saves made should corroborate this to a point. We show Dreher as having 6 quality shots on goal—but then again—that is “our story.” There are other ‘hair splitting’ facts and figures associated with the game, but the bottom line is that the girl did earn their spot in the third round. AFTER the Dreher game is where I probably should have handled things differently, at practice Thursday and mentally leading up to the game last night. A bus full of sleeping teenage girls on the way to a quarterfinal playoff game was not a good omen in hindsight!!! Nor was the dead cat lying on my truck’s hood when I left the house that morning. As a second year program we are still “learning to win” and this year was a great education. Quite simply I did not have the girls ready to show up and play at all against Riverside. Maybe next year “coach” will get it right……… Thanks goes out to Coach Terry for not pulling his starters at the beginning of the 2nd half. I just want everyone to know that he did not intentionally run the score up- I specifically asked him not to hold back in the 2nd half or cut the game short. Heck we drove all the way up there, we at least wanted to get the full 80 minutes right?!?
Look for great things from us next year- sorry for the extra long post- but I wanted to make sure everyone knows how proud I am of these young ladies and what a great job they did this year. (And put in a plug to the ranking committee!!!)
