ok... so remember the sport that I never intended to be fun but in the end happened to be exteremely interested in... Football? yup. It's back.
In the end the team was actaually more together than I thought we were and our commitment to the sport was more that average. There was another tournament, not SAISA, but an actual Interinternational School Tournament in Sri Lanka. The
perserverance and commitment to the sport is evident in each and every soccer player that came back to play another tournament of Football.
However, there were many challenges that we had to face.
First of all, most of our 12th grade players were already too busy with Ib work and decided not to play for this tournament. Others were on SAISA track. And the rest.... they didnt want to come. In the end, we only ended up with 11 players, some of which were not in the SAISA team.
Instead of simply giving up because of our scarsity of players, we
undertook the challenge, and
persisted throughout the tournament. With our lack of players, we recruited players who were recreational football players, and even though it was difficult since teamwork between them was not so strong, we had to
work collaboratively with them to make sure that they feel like they are part of the team so that we could work together. We did not have any official practices, since our coach was more concentrated on the current SAISA tournasment, Track, so we did not have a coach to guide us throughout this tournament, the players, including me, had to
initiate our own practices and
train on our weaknesses by ourselves. Each player heping the other to push us to be as good as we can be for the tournament.
My goal was to regain the confidence on the feild that I once had while I was playign during SAISA. I had played well during that torunament and my goal is to get back up to that goal . I
knew my strengths were reacting to the football and punting, however, I
needed to train on speed and endurance.
Thus, during practuce, I ran around the feild so that my endurance could be up for th match, as well as, practicing diving and penalty shots, so my skill level could increase. I had
develoed a new skill during these short training sessions. Since I was honestly quite hopeless with my feet, I asked the captain, Saba, to help me out with it. She taught me many new excersises by which I could increase my skill with foot work.
I had used most of these skills that i had learnt in the preliminary matches. What was different with this tournament, compared to SAISA, was that, the team used me more of a defensive player. Whenever the defence had the ball they would pass it back to me and I would change the direction of the ball. I feel that the training on footwork really payed off, I was much more confident with the ball.
