Football practice starts tomorrow (technically today by the clock). Equipment pickup was Saturday and we scored shoes and stuff Friday evening. It sure costs a lot to play football.

Pretty exciting to get back into the groove of the season. This is the third year my son has been playing now and this begins our march into the fall/winter. The season generally ends somewhere between Halloween and Thanksgiving depending on how far you go in the tournament.

The big drama this year is the likely merging of teams. At the bantam level (1st and 2nd graders) there’s enough kids coming in to fill three teams nicely. As you move up it becomes just one grade per level. So this year it’s just third graders. That alone cuts the number of kids available in half, in theory. That’s also the level where kids who aren’t way into it tend to drop out.

As it turns out we got an email a few weeks back that we were running short on kids to keep three teams up and that merging down to two would happen if 4 kids didn’t sign up by the end of the first day of practice. We kept getting updates as it go closer. Between trying to convince the powers that be that they could get by with smallr teams and that it offer a better experience for the kids and all that stuff and a few kids jumping on board, it got very close to keeping three teams. Basically, the bare minimum level that the people who make such decisions would allow is 16 kids on a team. When you figure there’s 11 kids on the field at any given time, that’s cutting it close, but not unreasonable. Makes sense to me.

So Saturday at equipment pickup the buzz was all about the number of kids at the 3rd grade level. For three teams of 16 we would need 48 to sign up. Any less and they’d be divided into two teams. As of our picking up our stuff Saturday orning 47 kids had signed on. Yeah! 1 fucking kid short.

It might not seem like a big deal, but the difference between 16 kids and 24 kids on a team is huge. The amount of playing time, instruction, learing, comraderie and general potential fun levels is pretty different in both situations. Some better on smaller teams some better on larger teams. I think our little guy would thrive more in a smaller team situation, so falling one kid short would really be kinda suck-ass.

From what I’ve understood during the course of being kept informed, it seems to me like the coaches would prefer the smaller teams as well.

Yesterday afternoon we got an email from the coach that simply read:

“We have come up one player short as of now to have three third grade teams. Forward me anyone who may be interested, even slightly. Thanks and see you Monday.”

Seemed like desperation with only the faintest glimmer of hope.

By last night another email came across that is too long and uninteresting to post here, but it almost seemed like a surrender of sorts. Basically asking for input on our feelings about team size and the pros and cons we saw both now and in the future as the kids get older. I guess we’ll find out how it’s all gonna play out tomorrow evening. I’m hoping something changes and we get the smaller teams.

Either way, it’s that time of year already and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.