Just taking a break for the summer.  Our registration period is underway and things are fairly calm (soccer wise anyway - with four kids in the house, things are never ‘calm’).  But we’re kicking off the Fall season planning next week so I expect I’ll have lots of posts as that gets underway.  Our league is poised to undergo a lot of change this year as part of our drive to affiliate with the North Carolina Youth Soccer Association.  Should be an exciting year.  I’m also thinking of trying to deploy a content management system for our website to make it easier for others to update the site.

For the second year in a row, the MYSA took some teams to a local 3v3 Tournament that is a field renovation fund raiser for a challenge association in Chapel Hill (they used to be Chapel Hill United but are now part of Triangle United after merging with the Durham Strikers)  Currently all of our players are Recreation level players (though a couple do play on challenge teams nearby)  So we figured this was a great opportunity to expose some of our more talented kids to a higher level of play and also a chance to see how our kids are progressing.  We got hammered last year, but hoped this year we’d be a little more competitive, especially in the upper age groups where we have a number of U12 kids aging out of our Recreational program and looking to start playing at the challenge level. Boy what a wake up call.

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Steve Gilliard has a wild post about Elvis Costello and Liverpool winning the European Champions Cup.  Elvis is a huge Liverpool fan and with the match on the line and Liverpool fighting back from a 3-0 deficit, he wasn’t ready to leave his television and start his concert.

Liverpool got the football score back from 3-0 to 3-3 and there was 25 minutes of normal time left. Will he wait that long? Yes he did. Slow hand clapping between background music and the crowd of middle-aged nice people started to get annoyed.

Then full time came, the TV’s went off and the band took to the stage to a bit of booing. Elvis went to the microphone and shouted "Norwich, I have only one thing to say to you - Let’s Be Having You" - a comment made by the Norwich Football Club Director, celebrity cook Delia Smith, at a recent match. This was met with more booing and a pint of beer being thrown over Costello, who was startled and almost amused.