It’s Monday morning after Week 8 in San Jose where we just clinched a spot in the PLL playoffs. With a team goal of winning the PLL Championship this season, clinching a playoff spot is the first step to hopefully accomplishing that goal. However, we still have a long way to go as every team in this league is capable of going on a run and beating any other team in the league. It’s not lost on us that Chrome has a record of 2-6 but is tied for the league lead in score differential and has two wins over the two teams at the top of the standings. This documents just how close everyone is. Each game comes down to a few plays, and if your team is the one that makes those plays, then you’re probably going to win, and if you don’t then you probably won’t.

Now the focus moves to winning on Saturday over a hot Archers team that took us to the wire in Week 4 in Baltimore. They just handed Atlas a 15-11 loss, and with that victory comes sole possession of 3^rd place, just two games behind us. Needless to say, both teams need this game. A win for them pretty much locks up a playoff spot and a win for us puts us in a great spot to lock up one of the top 2 seeds in the playoffs, which are critical spots to secure given the path that creates to the Championship game.

Each coach in this league will tell you every opponent is terrifying, so we will continue to keep our focus on ourselves, realizing that’s the only thing we can actually control. We can control our focus, our effort, and our selflessness. I have to commend our players on the respective sacrifices that they are making personally for the betterment of our team generally. In a team sport, our job as coaches is to try and create a team that is better as a group than they are as individuals. This is close to impossible, if everyone is not bought into this concept. For offensive players, this sacrifice may mean touching the ball less, or playing a different role than they’re used to playing. Defensively, it may mean altering your style of play so the group’s able to stay connected and the goalie doesn’t get hung out to dry.

For our staff, we’ve been blessed to have a group of players that put the team’s success ahead of everything else. Honestly, as talented as all of these guys are, the overall unselfishness of this group is clearly its best attribute and that has allowed us to win some very close games this summer. As the playoffs approach and the seeding takes shape, we must maintain our focus of staying team-first and hyper-competitive, but also realize that we need to ‘be a little different’ schematically each week in hopes that those things together will allow us to ‘make a few more plays’ than our opponents and win in the end.

LG CHAOS – yet another HUGE game for us on Saturday vs. the Archers – HUGE!