Front Office Football Central - View Single Post - One last season with the midgets, a real life coaching story

FrogMan · 10-02-2014, 11:28 AM

Two practices were still on the schedule before that first game on October 5th: Saturday and Monday evening.

I had not missed many of the practices/intrasquad games so far this season. I fact I had been to all of them, missing maybe some 15 minutes at the start of a couple of them. Thin is, while I watched the games, I was sometimes fooling with my phone but of the time, I was analizing the work of the goalies, paying better attention to Andrew's play. I like to watch him play.

Teams got shuffled regularly during preseason and the guys in charge of scouting gave me a list of players with their jersey numbers as well as the evaluation they had made of all of them. That evaluation was in the form of a score from 1 to 4 with 1 being the best and 4 being the worst. I viewed that as the same as most rating you'd give players in a text sim...

One thing I learned on Saturday though, the third goalie, the one who'd been cut from the A level, had decided he would not even play this season if he was going to play at the B level. Not the first time this has happened and something I just don't understand, but heh, it meant I now had the dominant goalie of the two available. Even though they had deleted their goalie rating from the spreadsheet they'd sent me, it was obvious Andrew is much, much better than the girl.

So I sat in the stands on Saturday evening with my list of players and I took notes. Some players I remembered from previous scrimmages but some other I was just discovering.

The kids had pretty much split themselves into two squads and it was obvious about 15 minutes into the scrimmage that one of them was much stronger than the other. It happened that Andrew was facing them first. I could see him getting frustrated by the lack of help his side was providing him. One thing was clear, I wanted to give him some support when a draft would eventually happen.

Now that's the thing, come Monday morning, I was still the ONLY coach for two teams. I was getting antsy. The last practice/intrasquad scrimmage was scheduled to be on Monday evening and the next event would be the first game of the regular season.

I decided to play with the players list on my lunch time on Monday and submitted two possible lineups to be tested on Monday evening. Scouts agreed that we could test those lineups during the evening's practice. I had built the lineups to be as fair as possible, giving the other team better defenders to compensate for the quality difference in front of goals while giving my team somewhat better, or should I say more balanced offense. Not so much very high end but with less highs and lows in between players. If I was going to put some work into it while nobody was, I also made sure to put kids I knew on my squad, kids I wanted to work with.

I taped a lineup on the two locker room and kids went almost crazy. Actually, without knowing it, I had put friends together while simply trying to make balanced lineups.

The game went ok with the puck moving from one end to the other for the first 15 minutes. The other team even scored first on Andrew. I then had to leave the game to pick up my team jerseys and when I got back, "my" team was kinda getting away. We looked a bit strong but some of it was simply on the goalies. I saw a couple breakaways happen that Andrew stopped with nice saves that I know the girl on the other side would probably not have stopped. There are things you just can't account for when there's this big a difference between goalies...

Anyway, I went to the locker room after the game and despite one team allowing more goals, most kids were telling me that they liked the lineups... One kid came to me telling me he didn't really have much fun that evening, that most his friends were on Andrew's team and if the teams stayed that way, he doesn't know how he'd enjoy his season. He's one of the lowest rated forward in my book so I switched him up with a higher rated on my squad once I got home thinking that could help even things up a bit.

None of the two scouts were there on Monday to see the result of my work. There I was, trying to hold a draft by myself, yet still trying to be fair to both sides, heh. But time was flying, there was no time left to lose... Again, first game of the regular season this coming Sunday, October 5th, with no other ice time until them...

FM

10-02-2014, 11:28 AM	#2
FrogMan Hattrick Moderator Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Pintendre, Qc, Canada	Two practices were still on the schedule before that first game on October 5th: Saturday and Monday evening. I had not missed many of the practices/intrasquad games so far this season. I fact I had been to all of them, missing maybe some 15 minutes at the start of a couple of them. Thin is, while I watched the games, I was sometimes fooling with my phone but of the time, I was analizing the work of the goalies, paying better attention to Andrew's play. I like to watch him play. Teams got shuffled regularly during preseason and the guys in charge of scouting gave me a list of players with their jersey numbers as well as the evaluation they had made of all of them. That evaluation was in the form of a score from 1 to 4 with 1 being the best and 4 being the worst. I viewed that as the same as most rating you'd give players in a text sim... One thing I learned on Saturday though, the third goalie, the one who'd been cut from the A level, had decided he would not even play this season if he was going to play at the B level. Not the first time this has happened and something I just don't understand, but heh, it meant I now had the dominant goalie of the two available. Even though they had deleted their goalie rating from the spreadsheet they'd sent me, it was obvious Andrew is much, much better than the girl. So I sat in the stands on Saturday evening with my list of players and I took notes. Some players I remembered from previous scrimmages but some other I was just discovering. The kids had pretty much split themselves into two squads and it was obvious about 15 minutes into the scrimmage that one of them was much stronger than the other. It happened that Andrew was facing them first. I could see him getting frustrated by the lack of help his side was providing him. One thing was clear, I wanted to give him some support when a draft would eventually happen. Now that's the thing, come Monday morning, I was still the ONLY coach for two teams. I was getting antsy. The last practice/intrasquad scrimmage was scheduled to be on Monday evening and the next event would be the first game of the regular season. I decided to play with the players list on my lunch time on Monday and submitted two possible lineups to be tested on Monday evening. Scouts agreed that we could test those lineups during the evening's practice. I had built the lineups to be as fair as possible, giving the other team better defenders to compensate for the quality difference in front of goals while giving my team somewhat better, or should I say more balanced offense. Not so much very high end but with less highs and lows in between players. If I was going to put some work into it while nobody was, I also made sure to put kids I knew on my squad, kids I wanted to work with. I taped a lineup on the two locker room and kids went almost crazy. Actually, without knowing it, I had put friends together while simply trying to make balanced lineups. The game went ok with the puck moving from one end to the other for the first 15 minutes. The other team even scored first on Andrew. I then had to leave the game to pick up my team jerseys and when I got back, "my" team was kinda getting away. We looked a bit strong but some of it was simply on the goalies. I saw a couple breakaways happen that Andrew stopped with nice saves that I know the girl on the other side would probably not have stopped. There are things you just can't account for when there's this big a difference between goalies... Anyway, I went to the locker room after the game and despite one team allowing more goals, most kids were telling me that they liked the lineups... One kid came to me telling me he didn't really have much fun that evening, that most his friends were on Andrew's team and if the teams stayed that way, he doesn't know how he'd enjoy his season. He's one of the lowest rated forward in my book so I switched him up with a higher rated on my squad once I got home thinking that could help even things up a bit. None of the two scouts were there on Monday to see the result of my work. There I was, trying to hold a draft by myself, yet still trying to be fair to both sides, heh. But time was flying, there was no time left to lose... Again, first game of the regular season this coming Sunday, October 5th, with no other ice time until them... FM __________________ A Black Belt is a White Belt who refused to give up... follow my story: The real life story of a running frog...