My daughter’s soccer club is holding tryouts this week for next season’s teams. I’ll be assistant coach once again and since I’m no longer fresh off the turnip truck as I was during this process last year I feel much more aware of what’s going on this year.  Let’s just say it’s an interesting process.

First off we have about 20 more girls trying out for the same number of slots than we did last year. That means the talent pool is deeper and that there will be harder decisions to make in terms of picking teams.  I’m not sure why we have so many more girls this year but I suspect it’s because the season is only for the fall and not fall/spring like last year.  My understanding is we don’t play spring in order to avoid conflicting with high school schedules.  Anyway, the result is we have a lot of girls to evaluate.

Along with professional player evaluators we coaches watched three hours of tryouts spread over the last two evenings.  With over 65 players to evaluate we had our work cut out for us, and it’s not over.  Tomorrow evening we will reconvene to pick our teams and it’s going to be tough.  You’d like for every kid to be able to play, but the reality is that Challenge is supposed to be a level above rec league so we really aren’t set up to be an "everybody plays" operation. That doesn’t make it any easier to tell a kid she’s just not good enough right now.  My daughter didn’t make the cut a couple of years ago and it about killed her.

I think I’ll be needing a couple of drinks when I get home late tomorrow evening.