Some notes from the weekend.
First football game of the season Friday night. I covered Good Ol’ ECHS who had won their season opener. Friday they were facing a team that easily beat them twice last season. ECHS had a 7-6 lead at halftime, and after turning a fumble into a scoring drive, were up 25-24 early in the fourth quarter. They promptly gave up a 58-yard TD run and ended up losing 36-25. A pretty solid effort, historically speaking.
They may well have won if they could have figured out how to stop their opponent’s running back. Kid ran for 328 yards and three touchdowns, and had another 40+ yard TD called back for holding. In shades of the Tony Sands game, they just kept giving him the ball – he carried it on 24 of 27 second half snaps – and he just kept cranking out yards. He averaged 9.8 yards per carry, which I think is pretty good, right? Thanks to a long game and some deadline issues that caused my editor to tell everyone to skip getting quotes, I didn’t have to talk to the ECHS coach after. I believe he would have had some interesting comments about his defense.
M. and C. both had soccer games Saturday. M.’s team rebounded from their 7-1 opening week loss with a solid 3-0 loss. They figured some things out and maybe, given the right opponent, could get a win soon. M. still does her thing of hanging back and not forcing her way into the action. After the game we told her she needs to get mean on the field. She didn’t seem thrilled with that idea.
This was C.’s first game and she fit right in with her team. She scored two goals Saturday, and could have netted a couple more if not for a speedy teammate who got to a couple balls faster than she did. She did a good job on defense, too. She also had a game Sunday, which I missed, but apparently scored a couple more goals and ran full speed on pretty much every play. We’ll see if she actually has talent for soccer, or any other sport, when she gets bigger, but she will always be a high energy player.
I missed her game Sunday because L.’s ice cream social was at the same time. She was soooo excited to finally go to her school. She has the same teacher to M. and C. had when they were three, which thrilled her even more. A couple kids from her 2’s class are classmates again this year. Being normal three-year-olds, they didn’t really interact. She can’t wait to actually start class next week.
A quick baseball note. That was some trade the Red Sox and Dodgers pulled off. There are all kinds of opinion pieces about it on the web, so I won’t get into who won or why either team made the decisions they did. I just love that some teams are still willing to pull off the Whitey Herzog-style trade that completely revamps their roster. Too many trades these days are focused on filling a single hole, or dealing with a single contract issue. I’m all for a team admitting they f-ed up a few contracts and deciding to ditch them in one fell swoop. Because of the size of the contracts involved, a deal this big is unlikely to happen very often. But I would love for more teams to package a handful of players for another handful and see what happens.
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