Junior Varsity Annihilation (After a Rocky Start)

In my high school soccer, there are two soccer seasons: region and pre-region (season and pre-season).  Tryouts were held at the beginning of August; pre-season started on the 13.  But that’s beside the point.  (By the way, I made Junior Varsity.  Woohoo!)  In my opinion, we had a rockin’ team.  I knew some of the older girls and was extremely excited and honored to be playing with them.  Unfortunately, our “great skill” didn’t get across to anyone looking at our game results.

We lost our first three games.

One of them was against Judge Memorial.  It was an away game.  We played on artificial grass.  In the middle of August.  At 5:00 in the afternoon.  Now I know that Utah is not as hot as, for instance, Texas or Florida, but that turf had been baking in the unobstructed sunlight all day.  The temperature was above 90ºF and the field was close to 110 degrees.

In short, it was scorching like the heat from a thousand suns (well, maybe not that hot).

It was awful.

And we lost.

Not our best day.  The next five games weren’t great either.  Sure, we won some, we tied some, though in the end, we didn’t get the results we wanted.In all, we did not look very impressive.  We were in a grim mood; our pre-season results were 2-1-5.  We kept on practicing, preparing for region games.

On the bright side, Varsity did pretty well in pre-season.  They finished pre-region with a 2-5-1 record and are currently 6-6-2 (both seasons).  In region, they have only lost and tied one game (both against Juan Diego) out of six.  No big deal.  If they win the rest of their games, they’ll be headed to playoffs and hopefully on to the State Championship.

Me
Image courtesy of Mel Oltra & MaxPreps

Then finally something clicked.  We started winning game after game.  Our passing was good, our shots went in just enough times to get us ahead, and we were all in high spirits.  We even gained a few memorable moments along the way (but those are stories for another day).  However, the best part is WE (JV) ARE UNDEFEATED in region!  No losses, no ties.  Not to mention, the past three games have been shut-outs!  Now, we won’t get anything if we go undefeated throughout the rest of the season, but there are other rewards.
1) it would sure feel nice compared to our horrific start
2) it would tremendously boost our self confidence
3) we would get bragging rights ;)

There are only two games remaining; JV plans to go out with a bang.  So wish us luck!

Me against a Juan Diego defender
Image courtesy of Mel Oltra & MaxPreps