  We won first place today at the Goals For Life tournament in Montclair, New Jersey. My soccer team urlLink Central Park Rangers (CPR) - Women's Team, met at 6:45am!!! Luckily, the meeting point was at the Avis two blocks from my apartment on 76th & Broadway. After a restless night of very little sleep, I awoke at 6:30am... a little later than I wanted to wake up and stumbled the two blocks to find that I wasn't the last to arrive. Whew! I'm always late, so it's a great, but rare feeling for me when I'm not the reason holding up a group of people.
First game was at 8am... it took us awhile to get our groove on, but we found ourselves dominating the other team on a very short, lumpy grass field. By half time, the score was 4-0. In the 2nd half, the other team had a lucky goal, but we answered back with 4 more goals to win 8-1. The second game was at 10am on the nice turf field, the same kind that we're used to playing on. Again we played well against a team that had enough subs to form a second team. In the end, we won 3-0.
The third and final game was at 12:30am on a grass field, just as lumpy as the first, but not as short. This game was ugly. The other team played really dirty and kept hacking. They were physically very intimidating too, but our skill definitely proved to be better. At one point though, I had a collision with their stopper who happened to be the largest women on their team. The collision didn't fade the big girl at all... she simply remained standing while I bounced off and landed on my ass.
Seriously wondering if we were ever going to score, we finally did and won 4-0. With 3 wins and 15 goals for, we knew that the only way we would lose the 1st place title was if the team also in contention for the title won their last game by 6 goals. Thank god they didn't. All in all, a great day of soccer. Personally, I think I played very well. I had a few assists, a couple of shots on goal (none of which went in though) and stellar passes and dribbling.
I rather enjoy playing stopper with the freedom to push up and roam around the field when the opportunity presents itself. Hopefully, I can continue to grow into that position. Exhausted now... spent rest of day walking around urlLink Woodbury Common Premium Outlet with Deb and Jess. Finally home at 10:30pm and going to bed... Game tomorrow at 1pm against Gingers, then on to urlLink Fiddlesticks (CPR's sponsor bar) for Free Keg Day... the prize for the other CPR quiz nite team (Manny, Ali E, Ali Hart, Kez and Trish). Should prove to be a very long day. 
