Coach Flip Naumburg's Journal

Saturday, March 4, 2006

LATER THAT DAY

CSU 9 THE COLORADO COLLEGE 3

The weather was calm and therefore neither cold nor hot. It was almost too civil to be a Colorado day, but I will take it thank you very much. It was about as pleasant as 60 plus degrees can be.

I know it doesn’t sound very gracious after winning a game 9-3, but I am not very pleased with how we played overall today. We pretty much dominated the game, but we didn’t seize and grab it like we all wanted to. In the end, however, it was a methodical sort of a beat down.

The Tiger goalie was often left to save his defense out there today. We got inside with the ball and very close to the goal on many occasions and usually with options still to use once there, i.e. lots of space . The Tiger's Chris Shopneck (CC #29 G) was terrific. There were many shots which he had no chance on but still made the save. Our own Petey filled our goal beautifully as well. Pete Jokisch (#3 G – ’06) pretty much owned the game by about the fourth quarter, and all the CC shooters seemed to know it by then, too. When he feels it, Pete can take over the game as a goalie, and that is something I see much more rarely in the game today than I did back in my playing day.

CC scored one goal early in each half, much to my consternation and completely against my instructions, but other than that we held them fairly dormant with a strong, stellar and finally deep defensive effort. I’m very pleased with the defense.

COACH NUMBERG I PRESUME

My coaching sucks right now, so it’s pretty hard for me to expect them to be perfect. Every call I’m making is not clearly the best. Sometimes it has been worse than that. I made some team and position changes last week that were radical. Let’s just say I’m not yet looking like the ‘Wizard’ with these new deals. Patience is still a virtue I hope.

Here is a perfect example of me now: I yell for us to hold the ball in a man up situation near the end of a quarter. If you are a man up or a man down and you have possession of the ball as the horn sounds to end a quarter, then you as the possessing team keep the ball to start the next period of play. So, it’s "NINE, EIGHT", and I scream, "Hold the BALL", "FIVE, FOUR". At that instant Tyler Bue (#19 - M - 2006) fed Pat Bird a beauty for the finish with three seconds left in the third quarter to give us a 7-3 lead to take into the fourth. That was a big goal. So then my next words were, "Or, we could just score now" and everyone laughed (at me). In case it might sound like an isolated incident, I had not just the one, but two mistakes for the one day on time management at the end of a quarter. The other one had to do with a flag down penalty coming situation where instead of us getting the ball to start the next quarter we had to face it off because of my lack of brain, and of course we didn’t get it (face off) or the ball.

I say thank you to my team for covering for me a few times today. I hope I can make it up next week or something……

SOME GOOD

We showed the ability to do many things well. We move on offense and attack on defense. We are gaining team confidence daily. This year they (the team) seem to love one another like the close brothers thing I always hope for, but is in fact rare. It shows already in how we play (most of the time).

A LITTLE BAD

Our clears were sloppy later in the game. We threw several passes to people who happened to not be looking at the time. I need to get to work on breakout clearing patterns….again. I want clearing the ball from our end to the other end to be one of our team strengths this year because I think it can be a very powerful part of OUR game. In my mind we are geared to clear if you will.

SCRATCHING THE ITCH FEELS GOOD

We spent seven years figuring out how to beat this team that we played today. Now I am somewhat startled that three years later we could play this poorly against CC and yet we were trying to get lots of players into the game in the last few minutes because we had the game ‘in the bag’. My greatest hope is that it says more about us than it does about anything else. I like to think we have in fact come a long way as a program in 10 years.

We pass the ball so nice and with such good spacing sometimes, and that whole rhythm and flow thing I preach ad-nauseam can look so good. Now, we gotta learn how to finish better.

FLY AWAY LITTLE BIRDY

Pat Bird (#1 M – ’07) took off a little bit today and that made my coaching mood soar. I love this kid, not just as a lacrosse player. He spends much of his time in a state of tortured soulness. It’s like we are kindred spirits that way. We also each bundle and express emotion in doses high enough to take care of way more than one normal person.

Today was a bit of an ‘06 breakout for the Bird as he had 3 great finishes for three goals on the day. Every time he scores it always seems like it is a huge moment in the game. One of them today , the tally that made it 4-2 right before the half was a Doylestown Diebolt (#13 – A – 2008) created pass to Pat who completed the running dunk. That goal kind of lit us up.

I hope this Bird we saw this afternoon is but a harbinger of things to come this Spring.

NO RAIN – NO RAIN

Next up is a three game road trip to Northern California, and we start by playing Sonoma State. They are the number one team in the MDIA. We are #2 so I guess this classifies as a 'showdown'. This trip should be fun from a ‘business’ point of view. . They (SSU secret scouts) came down and taped our game with Santa Barbara last week, but hey, I changed everything since then so now what are you going to do?

AT THE END OF THE DAY WE ARE JUST a 2-1 TEAM ranked #2

In conclusion I would say that we played superior overall last week at Whittier to how we did today, even though we lost that one. At the same time we saw things last week, and maybe even more today that were moments of almost thrilling lacrosse. These current visions give me hefty thoughts for the future. If this team continues to improve at the kind of rate it has shown at times, I can see myself getting pretty pumped. I must also remember that the space is not always that far between the good, the bad, and or the ugly.

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