[Val]

Well, I got my team last night, and I am very excited. There were four girls, any one of whom I would have been delighted to have, but who all decided to play co-ed, and so the talent level was a little dissapated for the all-girls league. This freed me to take my best player from last year, whom I had told earlier that I wouldn't take her because I wanted to recruit one of these other four. But Rani is now the best player in the league, barring some newcomer that I am not aware of, I think I can challenge her to be the player who will hold the ball and I'm going to try to get her to take over ball games. She likes the reactive nature of defense, but I'm going to turn her into a midfielder. LOL Or least give her lots of time to play there this year. There were two younger girls I wanted, who I had coached at YMCA ball two years ago (a vastly inferior league, even by our American standards), but both of whom had rather negative experiences playing co-ed last year, so I'm going to resurrect their games as well.

The only sad note is that my daughter has decided she'd like to play for the school team, and not for me. I'll miss her, but more than that, this is a bad decision I think on her part because she'll be playing full field and she doesn't have anywhere the stamina/speed to play full field. In her very specific case, SSG have been a godsend.