Teema: US Under 19 Team

Well... I can't say that I'm unhappy with the tactics we ended up with against Ukraine today. They just beat us.

Honestly though... i thought this season was going to be a bit of a rebuilding year (we had pretty marginal goaltending compared to previous seasons), so ending with the best finish the U19 team has ever had is quite the pleasant surprise.

I have to double check the roster, but I BELIEVE we have a bunch of good players returning next season... so hopefully we can keep up the momentum...

This was our best year in international to date. Looking forward to building off this season. We had 2 National teams advance to the playoff's and we have 4 domestic teams competing next season. This will help improve our National teams immensely.

Wow... very nice win over Latvia this weekend. I didn't get around to doing much in the way of tactics analysis prior to the match, and we still managed to win the match while playing on Low / Normal energy against a very decent team.

So far, we are undefeated in our group with 3 wins. No other team in our division has more than 1 win at this point. Not only that, but we've played 4 halves on Low energy, 1 half on VL, and 1 half on Normal, so we've been conserving energy too.

Looking very good so far this season.

Damn. slept on changing tactics for the game against Germany today. It was a swing game too (a game that, if won, could've set us up nicely to advance to the next round).

Damn.

ugggg. that 1st germany game is still haunting me. we're hanging on to an advancement slot by the skin of our teeth with 1 game left to go, but it's not looking great. If Iran wins, and we don't get at least a tie, we're screwed (and even in the case of a tie, we'd need germany to get blown out in order to beat them on goal differential)... even if Iran doesn't win, we could still technically lose our spot to them on goal differential.

I hate this. I feel like we'd be so much better positioned if we hadn't played low(er) energy on that first game and gotten blown out. At the very least we'd have a better goal differential cushion to count on...

we'll see what happens. Hopefully we can scrape through... I'd love to make it to the bracket round.

Holy shit. We made it through to the next round.

I think this is a first time any of the 3 u.s. handball national teams advanced to the bracket round..

wish us luck!

Good job!

I made it once or twice.

woo!

nooooooooo! it was sooooo close! Wow what a game though... playing on VH for pretty much the last 4 games straight mightve finally caught up to us today. We had a nice lead after changing tactics at half time, but ended up losing it in the final 10 minutes of the game.

Oh well...

I will say though, I had no expectation that we would make it so deep this season, so it was quite a pleasant surprise to see how well the team ended up doing this year.

Keep training up those youngsters, mates!

Well... for the first time in MANY seasons, i don't think we have any glaring holes to start this season. All of our goalies are returning, and we have enough players returning from last season to fill EVERY position on offense AND defense.

I don't remember the last time that happened. That's a VERY nice thing to have.

I will say that I'm not super happy with our Pivots as they are both sort of young (18 and 17) and not really studs yet... but they're both nearly 900 OR, so they should be almost 1100 OR by the end of this season. Not bad at all.

Jake Barrera is our one true superstar this season (players who end up over 1500 OR by the end of the season), but we have a much more well-rounded team this year i think.

And that's before I even add any new players to the mix!

decided to throw my hat into the ring for Cactus HC. I'm excited to see what BradGilbert does with the squad.

It's not a problem just yet, but we need someone to run the U19 team next season. I mean, I totally support BradGilbert if he wants to do it again. Just didn't see anyone signed up for candidacy.

Are there any 17 or 18 YO GKs who are 800+ OR? We have a couple of good 16YO keepers, but I haven't been able to find anything in between them and the 2 19 YOs who will be graduating after this season.

I only have Chad Schaffer (16) out of the players that have come from my sports academy. He seems to have pretty bad qualities; I wouldn't recommend him unless you're desperate; I'll probably replace him at some point.