Monday, July 16, 2007

NUTC 1

NMH was rather sleepy last year, but this year, we are on campus with both a soccer camp and....the American Idol camp! Very exciting. Interesting group of campers this week. Relatively few Massachusetts kids. Lots of kids from New York/New Jersey, Seattle, Nashville, plus three kids from Columbia. We are also starting to get the kids of some of the top players from the 80's.

Our counselors this week:

Micah Flynn(Boston)
Colleen Schmitt(Austin)
Emily Baecher(Mich)
Brent Anderson(Amherst)
Jess Huynh(Eugene)
Lexi Marsh(Toronto)
Dylan Tunnell(Atlanta)
Sam Roberts(Amherst)
Ted Munter(Boston)
Josh Ziperstein(Atlanta)

Awesome. Lots of new faces, but they just jumped in and it seemed like they had been here all along. Excellent teachers and role models.

We had our normal welcome meeting and the kids reacted with the usual horror about having to get up early for the first real day of camp. Indeed, as we moved to the fields in the bright morning sun, the kids seemed to get a bit of slow start. The kids are doing a a pretty good job of self-monitoring, but there is the usual...calibration as they get used to the standards and expectations of camp.

We ran them through the basic fundamentals and the skill level is pretty much all over the map. It was a tricky day as we had several thunderstorms that made us get off the fields quickly, but the campers were very patient and we only lost about an hour of scrimmage time.

Last night we divided the campers into teams and today we start working on some offense ideas.

More to come.....

2 comments:

Josh Mullen said...

George,

Please tell me that you are going to update the blog more than every monday for the next three weeks.

I need the NUTC updates to help me get me through my week.

It just feels wrong to not be at camp right now.

Hope all is going well there, everyone is hydrating and using baby powder wisely (so you don't have to have your baby powder talk and what it is used for).

If there is any wonder to why NUTC camp is successful, people need look no further than the list of instructors. I would have given a hand to learn from any of them in high school (or even now). Tiina picks people that are not only great players but even better people.

-josh

p.s. still might show up to sell stuff or something, and might bring a segway rider.

gapoole said...

I played 4 games at the Philly Invite on Saturday, then helped out as an assistant coach on Sunday for the NJ YCC team's 5-hour practice. It was hot and very tiring. Now, though, all I can think about is how exhausting NUTC was (and should be). I think you guys do a great job of creating a reasonable challenge for such a wide spectrum of players, but it would still freak me out to be responsible for so many kids in such heat.