Here is a day by day analysis from a Milwaukee Select player who wishes to remain anonymous. Enjoy:
Dec. 31
Started off with a team meeting at coach's room. He really emphasized that this will be the highest level of lacrosse most of us will ever play. That stuck to a lot of us well. At like three o'clock we had the team practice at the game fields for an hour. We all looked out of it kind of. Not rusty per se just like we haven't played together for so long. That night, despite it being new year's eve, we had an eleven o'clock curfew. But prior to that most of the team was down by the pool talking to the other teams and such. Mesa Fresh did indeed get into a legit fight with the locals. Nothing came of it though.
Jan. 1
The day started off with a two hour weather delay. We then started the day off against Mesa Fresh, the eventual fourth place team. Between them winning every faceoff and us not being able to clear the ball at all they manhandled us. The actual individual players weren't that good though. James Tjarksen was a much better player than all of them. I feel as if we played them during our peak this summer it could have actually ended in our favor. The final was 14-3. The rain also put some early jitters on some of our players worrying about their pockets.
The next game was against the Maryland roughriders. They were absolutely sick! They ended up finishing third. The demolished us 14-1 and despite what everyone was saying, they were a much better team than the Mesa Fresh squad. OUr defense couldn't even comprehend what they were doing. They were so quick, so smart, and so good. On top of our poor defense the offfense was quick to lose the ball. We were on d probably 90% of the game...literally.
Our final game of the day was against the eventual last place team I believe. The Tampa Bay Tribe were terrible. We should have shut them out and just poured on the goals. We did end up winning 12-5 I think, or something along that. But that was after a second half scare of them scoring like five straight to tie it up.
That night we were all beat and just went to the local pizza place, ate and went to bed by before ten.
Jan 2.
We started off the day ranked sixteenth in the 26 team tournament. This game was also the only game to have an upset when we lost to the seventeenth ranked squad. As a team this was our worst performance all year. We should have handled the copperhead yet lost 9-3. Their team was not even good. We lost a lot of focus because of refs that to be honest were not up to par all tourney (not meant to be an excuse) and getting down on eachother.
Our second game of the day was against the supposed second worse team. Despite it looking like we played decent we still managed to lose 6-5. This was even with a two goal lead at half, and them scoring an embarrassing own goal on themselves.
Jan. 3
Basically it was the last place game. We almost lost this one too but beat the Tampa Tribe again to secure not last place. This game was basically a joke for us. The warm up was playing soccer and watching videos on the internet. We still won though so that's all that matters.
Overall we finished 2-4 and did not represent Mil-town very well in my opinion at least. Hopefully in the next couple years we can make it again and show them the true side of Wisco.
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