Evan's playing U7 soccer

This is Evan’s third year playing fall soccer, and this year he’s now on a U7 team that has 8 players and plays 4 against 4 (as opposed to the younger leagues playing 3 vs 3).  They still don’t use a keeper at the goal, but they are learning some new skills.  In fact, Evan has really developing some great new ball handling skills and has been putting his new “tricks”, as he calls them, to work in the games.  In fact, in several games I overhead parents commenting on his fancy footwork!  The coach this year isn’t focused on them getting goals, but on them developing new skills and I’d say he’s doing a good job at that.  In pretty much every game, our team didn't scored as many goals as the other team, but they are learning how to dribble and control the ball more.  Part of this means they are spending more time thinking about what to do when they get the ball, and that has opened it up to them getting it stolen away by the other team, but I like how they are learning to think more strategy into the game still.

Evan stopping the ball with his foot, to do one of his "tricks", where he then moves the ball backward in another direction.

The "Snow Leopards" team

Gotta play at the nearby park after the games!

Evan also has started showing a tendency to want to hang back and be more of a defender, rather than always be right up in the crowd around the ball.  He gets the ball then when the ball breaks away from the crowd, and in the direction toward his goal so he tries to defend his goal.  It makes me wonder if he’ll want to play keeper once he’s at an age level where there are keepers (which I think starts next year in U8), or if he’ll still want to be out in the field in a defender type position.  He does like scoring goals though, and I am not sure how much it bothers him he did not score any this year, but his fancy footwork “tricks” are really impressive and I can tell he enjoys that too.  He did have one really good drive that he shot for the goal and missed, the ball went out of bounds just past the goal. We could tell he was upset about that miss and he did start to cry, but quickly sucked it up and ran after the ball, and got back into the game.

He also has started expressing more interest in throwing balls (like footballs, or baseballs with his new glove) so his interest in playing other sports is growing and we’ll have to see if soccer is one that he still wants to continue playing or not.  Time will tell….