Amity has played keeper at least some of the time since she started U10 soccer (which is where they start using goalies). However, this year her team has both a tremendous need for Amity to play defense and also another player who is a pretty great goalie. As such, she's not spent any time in net this past fall, and was missing it a bit. Her ever resourceful coach, Keith, had the perfect solution to this conundrum. He was coaching a winter indoor team of 13/14 year old girls that didn't really have anyone who had experience or interest in playing goalie, so he asked Amity to come guest in. Amity had a lot of fun playing with this crew, and as they are slightly older travel kiddos I think it gave her something proximal to aspire to as well. It was definitely mutually beneficial, though, as the team was THRILLED not to have to take turns in net and to be able to offload the responsibility to someone who actually wanted to be there.
Starting next month Amity's planning to try out for travel soccer, and she'll have to decide whether she tries out as a keeper or just a field player. My suspicion is she'll stick to the field, but will perhaps reveal her goalie prowess to her future coach once she's been placed on a team, in hopes of scoring a backup (or backup to the backup) gig.
