The Laurier Brantford co-ed soccer team had a disappointing tournament at Humber Lakeshore on Friday, November 15.  The team finished the day with one win, one loss and a tie, and was on the outside looking in when it came to the playoffs. As it is in most tournament formats, a lot of the games don’t leave a lot of room for error and the team couldn’t get going early enough so they could move onto the next round.

Captain Kamden Holder talked about this issue after the tournament, “It took us a while to start scoring in the tournament, we had plenty of chances throughout the day and didn’t capitalize as many as we could have.”

But the tournament wasn’t all doom and gloom for the team. Holder still feels that all three of those games were very winnable, “Despite for the excellent overall effort a lot of the games came down to lapses both offensively and defensively.” One of the tactical errors that hurt the Golden Hawks defensively was that they had left their last man back by himself with the goalie as his only support and that creates too many high percentage chances for the other team.

This is only the first tournament for the team this year and a couple of people on the team felt that they improved in each of the games of the tournament. The way the Golden Hawks played throughout the day supports that theory due to the fact they lost their first game, tied their second and won their third one.

In the one game that the Golden Hawks won, they came out and played a very aggressive style of play. They pushed the tempo on offense and stayed true to their responsibilities on defense. If they played that way throughout the tournament, who knows what kind of success they could have had.  Usually, with the final game of any tournament, fatigue starts to set in; the players legs start to get heavier and that’s where mental mistakes start to happen because you aren’t thinking about your responsibilities, only about how tired you are. But this team was able to pull through when they should have been tired and that shows that the talent is there and the team is close to pulling it together.

Communication and developing team chemistry still seems like a work in progress, and the team has confidence that this will come along eventually with more practice time. As Chris Caldaroni says, “The skill and tactical abilities are there we just need to build chemistry in practice.”

This team shares the attitude that what they are practicing is the way to win and doesn’t appear to jump ship anytime soon. As it does for any team in sports, sometimes the details are the things that hurt you the most. That seems to be the case with this team and there is a saying in sports when you take care of the details, everything else just falls into place.