soccer

Well, the summer soccer season is coming to a close. We have 2 more games left. How should I summarize my experiences on this team?

Most of the time I don't mind that our team loses every game. Yeah, sometimes it's frustrating, but I do get to feel good about myself for being one of the better players, and I also play on this team because I actually like the other players. Really none of us are jerks and we're all just playing for fun. We have to be, since obviously we're not playing to win. Most of the teams we play against have a few (or many) jerks on their team, and I don't think I'd rather play on their team and win a few, because that'd be even more frustrating.

Besides, at times I think as a team we're not so bad, and we really could have won 3 or 4 games this year. There were 4 games within 2 points. I think we had a chance at each of those games, but we just couldn't keep it together the whole hour (the summer games are only an hour, both because of the heat and because they have to fit a lot of games into a small amount of time). We were even ahead for a while in two of those games, over half the game in one case.

As it turns out, I think (at least for this season) I enjoy more the games where we have no chance to win, the games where we lose by 4 or more. I'm sure that makes no sense. But maybe I can explain a bit. I mostly play defense, so for one thing there's a lot of action and challenge in the games against teams that are far better than us. I can really push myself to the limit and improve when we play a team whose offense is really good. That's the small reason I prefer the games where we have no chance. The main reason, though, at least I think it's the main reason, is that when we have a chance at winning, when we're actually ahead for some of the game, it's a lot more stressful for me. Our team struggles a lot to put together a strong attack, and in a game where we actually have a chance, that's really frustrating. To play really good defense the whole game and only let two goals past the whole time, and then to have our team only score 1, or none at all, is tough. I don't like getting upset at the forwards, because I know their job is hard, but it stresses me out a lot more when people make mistakes in a game that we could win if we'd just play our best for more than a third of the game than in a game where it really doesn't matter anyway, because we're going to get creamed no matter what. That goes for me and the defense, too, but I think most of the team would agree that our defense tends to be a little stronger than our offense. That may be just because our defense gets a lot more practice, since we have to spend much more than half the game being attacked, which means our offense is spending much less than half the game attacking. Plus we tend to have our experienced players play defense and let the new people play up front where it's not as critical if they make a mistake.

At any rate, it's been a pretty enjoyable season, which is saying a lot considering our record. I hope the team stays together long enough to really mesh together and improve, because I still would like to win a game sometime.