Soccer season ends

by Ed Rozmiarek

Since I commented on the start of the soccer season in an earlier blog entry, I guess I should mention the end of the season.

The regular season for Kevin’s team finished up about three weeks ago. The final game was a rainout makeup game against the East Austin Tuzos. Kevin’s team and the Tuzos were both undefeated going into the game so the winner of the game would end up in first place for the fall season. Kevin’s team jumped out to a quick 2-0 lead and added another goal prior to half time to take a 3-0 lead. The second half was more of a battle with each team scoring two goals resulting in a final score of 5-2 for the win.

Making a save during the second half.

Kevin ready to stop a penalty kick. The kick went wide.

With the win, Kevin’s team finished with a record of 7-0, scoring 27 goals in those games and only giving up 7. The first place finish also allowed them to get a bye into the post season playoffs as the second place teams in the north and south divisions had to playoff for the third playoff slot.

This past weekend was the playoff tournament for the Western District of the South Texas Youth Soccer Association. For the U-12 boys, there were 8 teams from several parts of south Texas including Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and as far away as Brownsville. (For those of you who don’t know, Brownsville is about 375 miles from Austin.) We were fortunate in that the tournament was here in Austin which meant that we didn’t have to travel for it.

A first game save.

Fernando takes a shot.

For the round robin part of the playoff tournament, Kevin’s team played three games this past Saturday. (With the first at 8:00 in the morning.) As you would expect for a tournament with the top teams, the competition was pretty tough. All three games were hard fought. The first game was a 1-1 tie, the second a 1-0 win and the third was a 2-4 loss.

In these tournaments the teams get points for wins, ties, goals scored and shutouts. As it turned out, after the round robin, Kevin’s team was tied for second place in their bracket with 14 points. In that case, the first tie breaker is “goal differential” (i.e. goals scored minus goals allowed). Based on straight up goals, we would win the tie breaker by one goal. However, there was a rule that for goal differential, the most a team could gain or lose is three goals per game. Well, the other team lost one game by a score of 5-0, so that game only counted -3 to their goal differential. That two goal swing was the difference and gave the other team the tie breaker. So, Kevin’s team didn’t make it to the semi-finals and it brought the season to an end.

Kevin stopping a 2 on 1 breakaway.

Kevin punting the ball after a making another save.

All in all it was a pretty good season. The boys played well and came together as a team, the parents were supportive and fun to be around and the coach did a great job, getting along with the boys & parents and doing a good job at coaching & training the team.

Kevin had a really good season. He was the number one goal keeper and played keeper most of the season. I was a little concerned with this since Kevin got to play very little as a goal keeper last year and I thought his skills would be rusty. He started off the year a little out of sync but got better as the year went on. During the playoff tournament this weekend, he played very well. In fact, during the second game of the day, Kevin made several great plays including stopping two open breakaways (a young goalie’s nightmare).

As much as I like watching the games, I’m looking forward to having my weekends back for a few months as we have a lot of work ahead of us getting the house ready to sell.

Posted by Ed Rozmiarek at December 5, 2004 8:05 PM