Great Soccer Weekend!

Wow, what a great weekend! Abby and her soccer team played in the Stones River Spring Shootout in Smyrna, TN, which is just southeast of Nashville. With nine teams from across Tennessee in the '98 Lady Wolves division, we new it was going to be a tough tournament. Things didn't start off to well on Saturday morning. The girls were completely out of sinc and played poorly. The end result was a 1-4 loss to Tennessee Futbol Club-Black Team from Franklin, TN. It was amazing how a bunch of ten and eleven year old girls can get down on themselves. They decided that was enough.

Their Saturday afternoon game was interesting. With severe storms in the area, along with thunderstorm and tornado warnings in the surrounding counties, the girls played the Harpeth Futbol Club - White team. The game made it to the half with the Lady Wolves up 1-0. The game was suspended for fifteen minutes while a line of storms came through. We all waited out the storm and hail in our cars. After it came through, it was decided to suspend the rest of the games for the day. Fortunately for us, the tournament rules say that if you had made it to halftime, it is considered a complete game. Which gave us the win. They used a weird point system for this tournament where you get so many points for a win, so many points for a shutout, and points for point differential per game up to 3 points. So we got points for winning, points for a shutout, and one point for the goal we scored. So after Saturday, we were sitting in fourth.

After the storms came through, the temperature dropped...a lot! So Sunday morning we had to play at 8:00am in a wind chill factor of 32 degrees. It was so much fun! The girls had to win this game to advance to the semi-final round of games. The girls played their old nemesis from Memphis, the Purple Rain. We lost twice to them in the fall by one goal both times. The girls played awesome! It was like they decided they were a soccer team and no one was going to beat them. The dominated the game from the beginning and won the game 4-0! And we were off to the semi-finals against the #1 seed, Tennessee United Soccer Club from Brentwood, TN. It was a tough game for the girls with the game scoreless at the half. But our girls dug deep and won the game 2-0. Abby had a great assist on the second goal. And we were off to the Championship game.

Because of the storms on Saturday, everything and been pushed back on Sunday, so we didn't play the championship game until Sunday evening. We played the Tennessee Futbol Club-White team from Franklin, TN. It was the sister team to the team that had beat us on Saturday morning. It was a great defensive battle, but the Lady Wolves pulled out a 1-0 win, with a score by one of our defenders. I will say that our goalie, Morgan Williams, is the best goalie in the state in our age group. Nothing gets by her. She didn't play Saturday morning, because she had strep throat, but showed up in the afternoon to play. And if you notice the scores, nothing got by her. The girls played great and we are so proud of them. Abby has come along so much over the year and it is just a matter of time before she gets her goals. She is still the newest girl on the team, and has made so much progress.