Coach Marshall and Player Peyton

Peyton and Marshall just finished their first soccer season with Marshall as Coach.  I feel very blessed to be married to a man that would take on the task of coaching 11 4-year-old boys.  Marshall left work early once a week to practice with the boys and had a game almost every single weekend and some week nights.  He also kept the team organized and dealt with the soccer league, not an easy task! He now has 10 4-year-old new best friends.  He had a great assistant coach, Coach Phil, who is one of our friends in the neighborhood.  We formed a team of boys Peyton's soccer age that will attend kindergarten together (these boys will start kindergarten next year, Peyton will start the year after but for soccer purposes has to play with his birth age)We had hoped Marshall coaching would get Peyton more comfortable on the field but for most of the season Peyton chose to sit on the sidelines and play at random whenever he felt like joining in.  Marshall was so patient with him and really let Peyton pick it up at his own pace.  By the end of the season Peyton was playing entire games and even making some contact with the ball! Their team, the Panthers, had the unfair advantage of accidentally being placed in the league with teams that had played previous seasons.  Our team had never played and are only 4-years old so I'm sure you can picture the chaos :)  They pretty much got their bottoms kicked every single game (like being outscored in the double digits) but they had a great time and handled it all so gracefully, thanks to their coaches.

I think Coach Marshall would say that he enjoyed the season as much as the kids did.

Here are some pictures from our final game and pizza soccer party.  The trophies were definitely the highlight of the kid's season.  Way to go Panthers!

These 2 were usually along for the ride but they usually didn't stay strapped in for long.

Coach Marshall and Coach Phil

Talking Strategy

Pizza Party after last game!

Trophy Presentation!

Recap of the season

This was from an earlier game when Marshall and Peyton wore jerseys in honor of our Aunt Nicki. Aunt Nicki is fighting breast cancer and her son's college soccer team, Davidson, made these shirts in her honor.  The silhouette on the shirt is of our cousin Chip- who is an AMAZING college goalkeeper.