I started coaching my daughter’s soccer team last year, as I wrote about here. I’d never been a head coach before, in any sport, and had no confidence in my ability to do it. But I plunged in, and learned enough about the game on the fly to teach bits and pieces of it to the kids. We had a really good fall season, followed by an okay spring season. 

For reasons that I think made sense at some point, I decided to move the team up to a travel league this year. We’re getting crushed on the field, but the kids are working hard and enjoying themselves, giving me hope that we’ll be a little more competitive in the second half of the season.

This past weekend, we played three games, all on Sunday. I entered our team in this particular tournament…

Tags: Tags: coaching, fitness, soccer, sports, workouts

Yesterday, as I was leaving the gym, I bumped into a fellow middle-aged guy who usually works out about the same time I do. “Must’ve been a good one,” he said, pointing to my sweat-soaked T-shirt. 

I hadn’t really noticed that it was a particularly good workout, but after he said that, and after I broke a fresh sweat walking to my car in the mid-80s heat, I found myself re-evaluating. I’d tried a new circuit of exercises for my hips and core at the start of the workout, and I’d found a use for a new toy, my Gymboss timer. So, yeah, a good one.

I also thought back to Tuesday night, the first practice of the season for my daughter Meredith’s soccer team. It was probably 85 when we started, and within an hour several of the girls had guzzled through all the water…

Tags: Tags: coaching, soccer, sports, sweat, workouts

Let me say up front that I’ve never coached a team at any level before, and don’t pretend to have any particular skills or knowledge in that area. All I know is that my daughter’s recreational league needed someone to coach, I volunteered, and managed to get the team through the season almost undefeated.

In fact, we were undefeated until yesterday. But nobody expected our team to win that last game, so in that sense I still consider the season a remarkable success.

Readers of my original Male Pattern Fitness blog may remember this entry, about one of my daughter’s soccer games two years ago.

Here’s a quick recap of the part that’s relevant to this post:

My daughter [Meredith] is probably the youngest player in the league (her birthday was just on the wrong side of the cutoff), which means the median player is a year…

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Tags: Tags: coaching, family, soccer, sports