I’m not going to try and say our recent rains have ended our drought. We’ve only had about 14″ of rain in five months this year, vs ~30″ all last year. But we sure seem to have had a lot of rain when it rains. Looking back at our Spring season, we rescheduled at least half of our regularly scheduled matches, mostly due to rain. Many teams managed to get one or two practices completed in February before matches started in March. I can’t prove it (because I’m too laz^H^H^Hbusy to look up rainfall for every day this year), but it sure seems like we got a lot of rain either late in the week (Thursday/Friday) or on the weekend, which made mincemeat of our schedule. My U11 Girls had one match rescheduled four times before we finally got it completed.

So I guess this is a fitting end to our Spring season.


We normally have a travel soccer party for the kids on travel teams, since many teams don’t do individual parties. We bring out a big grill to the soccer complex, put up the tents and tables, and tell families to bring lots of folding chairs and a certain type of food or drink. The kids run around the complex, the parents socialize in the blocked off parking lot, one of our coaches DJs, and a lot of fun is had by all.

So we arrived at the complex 90 minutes beforehand to get setup. It had been a gorgeous day – mostly sunny and warm, with a slight breeze. Nobody thought to check the forecast. Just as we were finalizing everything, and a few folks were showing up, the horizon turned a nasty shade of charcoal and the wind picked up. We moved all the DJ stuff under the small (10’x20′) overhang in front of our concession stand, and hoped for the best. By the time we had about 100 people there, the thunder came and the skies opened up. Everyone packed under the overhang. It rained, and rained, and rained. We had already stared grilling, so we kept grilling under a canopy, opened the concession stand, turned it into a huge buffet window, and told the masses huddled under the overhang to eat, take some home, and we’d chalk this up to bad weather.

About fifty diehard folks stayed to chat and eat under the shelter. So we didn’t start taking everything down until around 6:30ish. And wouldn’t you know it, as we put up the last soaking wet tent and emptied the last trash can – the sun came out for the rest of the evening. Sigh.

At least the fields are really green and filling in fast!