2019/2020 Season - U11

We had twenty (20) girls come to tryouts in July of 2019, and we ended up adding four players (Claire, Izzy, Abby, and Blake) to the team - without having to displace anyone from our current roster. Fairly unheard of…

We now represented ten different communities - Minneapolis, Edina, White Bear Lake, Farmington, Rosemount, Inver Grove Heights, Hastings, St. Paul, Minnetonka, and Eden Prairie.

Fall 2019

Once again, we played our true age group (U11) in the fall to showcase and scout, and once again didn’t find much competition.

In early November, we headed to St Louis for the SLSG Fall Classic, and came up against 3 ECNL clubs - Ohio Elite, St Louis Scott Gallagher Missouri, and SLSG Illinois.

We had our hands full at this event, didn’t come ready to play, and finished a disappointing 1-1-1.

Winter 2019/2020

Spurred on by this disappointing performance, I remember coming into the winter training months with a renewed focus.

The team started out well in the TCSL U12G Winter League, then everything came to a screeching halt in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Around March 15, 2020, everything soccer got shut down here in the state. While the club scrambled to figure out how to continue forward, we began online training sessions on March 24. Luckily, I had taken video of all our games (and a majority of our training sessions) and had a lot of material I could cover with the girls.

I hosted 3-4 Zoom video analysis sessions per week for the team, mixing up breakdown of our own games and breakdown of professional and national team games. I reached out to the University of Minnesota’s Women’s coach and got access to their video archives as well, so we also analyzed some collegiate games.

We also started using FlipGrid - a platform on which I could upload video of themselves working on technical footwork assignments, and I could respond to their post with my own video providing comments, critique, and guidance.

Spring/Summer 2020

After a month of this, we started to mix in some Zoom training sessions. This usually entailed me sitting and my desk giving instruction and providing what individual feedback I could. These were never easy for a multitude of reasons - poor internet connections, poor camera angles/quantities, etc. But we made it work.

The girls also had technical homework (footwork) assignments and fitness runs.

In May, once we could get outside on a regular basis, I tried to stream training sessions for the girls - working with my daughter 1-on-1, with the rest of the girls outside in their front/backyards following along. Didn’t work out well in my opinion, mainly because it was difficult for me to provide feedback - tiny phone screen and Zoom mobile only allowed me to see one player at a time. But we tried.

June 11 we were able to begin in-person outdoor training again with restrictions (masks and social distancing). We couldn’t scrimmage, or run exercises/activities that put players in close contact with one another, so training was mainly individual technical work. But it was something. And at least we were together.

We didn’t play any games the summer of 2020, and limped into tryout in mid-July after the strangest soccer year I’d ever experienced.

Jump to our U12 season here.