Alumni Soccer Tournament 2007

Another Alumni Soccer Tournament has come and gone. I was looking forward to playing in this tournament again. It's fun to play with people you only see once a year, you are all out of shape and you are playing against a bunch of kids who just came out of high school and have tons of energy. And, once again, I was planning on winning this year.

I was totally prepared this year. I had brought my old set of jerseys so our team would all look alike. I had put a number of pump up songs on my IPOD shuffle to listen to before the game while warming up. I didn't drink Coke between games and instead opted for Powerade, granola bars and fruit. Basically, with all that, I figured the other team should just hand us the victory because we were bound to win.

Not quite. We played Bethany in our first game and got trounced. They were flying off the walls and we were getting worked over. We managed to escape that game with a 4-0 loss. Then an hour later we had to play the younger Alumni team. This was a much slower paced game and although we played well we just couldn't score. We ended up losing that one 4-1.

So although we lost our 2 round robin games lucky for us everyone made the playoffs! After a hearty brunch of pancakes, sausages, toast, and cereal (thanks Glenda for the bowl!) I was ready to play again. This time our team came out flying. We changed up our formation a bit and it worked well We dominated the other Alumni team and won the playoff game 5-1. That put us into the final where we had to play Bethany again.

The final started off well and we scored first giving us the 1-0 lead, but Bethany bounced back and at half time it was 1-1. The second half was going ok, but 2 quick goals from Bethany and we were down 3-1. We came back to 3-2 but a little scrambly goal by them gave them anothehr 2 goal lead and it was 4-2 with about 6 minutes left. We then went on the offensive and pushed for a goal. It also started to get dirty. It had been an extremely physical game and not all the Bethany players understand how to play safe when you are playing around cement walls. I got checked into the stage one game by a guy twice my height and one of our players also got hit into a cement wall at the final by that same guy. We then started to fight back and some of the hits that were given by both teams were more geared for hockey then soccer. In our push for a goal we actually ended up giving up 2 more and lost with a final score of 6-2.

It was once again a lot of fun and I'm already looking forward to next year when we can once again try to win the glorious Bethany Cup!