Jack had another great season of soccer—scoring goal after goal, being “the gnat” on defense, and once again showing some maturity amongst his young team (Jack misses the age cut-off by 2 days so he competed in the U8, or Under 8, league this year). He’s an amazing athlete—fast, agile, focused, driven, and with some fancy footwork. He has such a good time playing just about any sport—each week he tells me a new sport he’d like to add to his training regime…tennis, swimming, lacrosse, you name it—but soccer is definitely his favorite. This season was another good confidence-building season for Jack, but he was definitely ready to move on (he was probably ready to move on before this season, but the beginning of this season was such a crazy time—early March, need I say more—that we didn’t push for a change). We knew he would love to play with career coaches (as opposed to volunteer dads, for whom we are of course so grateful for stepping up season after season), amongst other players who are equally driven, and at more than one practice per week. So, we signed Jack up to try out for the U9/U10 Academy Soccer team. The tryouts were in May over two nights, 1 hour and 45 minutes each night. Jack played his heart out. We drove away from the second night of tryouts and I told Jack that he had definitely done all that could have and had left everything on the field. We got a call just over an hour later inviting Jack to join the team. I’m so excited for him. Practice starts in August—can’t wait to see him develop and also see if he leans more towards offense or defense.
These are just a few shots from his spring season—his team wore blue as the “away team” and white as the “home team”, although they always played on the same fields. This coming year we’ll travel a bit, probably 45 minutes at the most.
Jack making the academy team for the coming year also coincided with a “tween-age” update we were doing to his bedroom (he turns 9 this summer—yikes!). We decked out his bedroom with trophy shelves and a life-sized Fathead of Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona/Argentina National Team soccer player) and with many sports accents. The Fathead is, quite frankly, a little obnoxious so I was looking for some more tasteful wall art options, preferably something personalized. I saw a black & white photo collage of adult soccer players on pbteen.com, so I figured why couldn’t I make the same thing for Jack’s room of Jack actually playing. We did a photo shoot one evening on some pretty rough public fields (you’ll see the clover in the images)—the light was beautiful that night and we had a fun time (after Jonathan drove home to get soccer balls…yes, we made it all the way to the fields with no soccer ball in our car). And, I love the result. Jack has a canvas of his collage up on the wall in a grouping with a few maps (he’s kind of obsessed with Stack the States and Stack the Countries) and an inspirational quote (Wayne Gretzky’s “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”—thought it was appropriate for a soccer player).
The inspiration:
Jack’s collage:
Some images from our evening on the fields:
{in addition to the clover all over the field we found a ton of little tiny frogs hopping around.}
Love our little soccer player—looking forward to a great and exciting season!
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