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(click to watch the National Championship Highlight Video - our team is pictured towards the very end of the video)

Orlando, Fl (August 7, 2005) - The u8 (rising u9) team played in the Challenge Sports 3v3 National Championship this weekend at Disney's Wide World of Sports. The team returned with the second place trophy after a fantastic weekend of intense competition and lots of fun.

On Friday and Saturday we played in preliminary play. We played 4 games and finished 3-1 on the day. That puts us into a tie for second place and we made the final four.

We opened up against a team from San Carlos and won  4-3. We were down in this game 1-0, it was then tied 2-2, we then took over and won 4-3. San Carlos scored their final goal with 10 seconds remaining.

In our second game we played the Tampa Knights. The Knights come from one of the top Tampa area clubs. This team played last year in a travel 4v4 league in the Tampa area. Their record in that league, combined with their record in tournaments, was 18-0 going into the tournament. We beat Tampa 6-0.

Our third game was a match of two undefeated teams, ourselves and the Lady Falcons. This was a team that had a big size advantage over us but our girls were up to the test. With the game tied 3-3 and momentum running against us we ran our "purple" play to perfection and scored a quick goal to set up the 5-3 win.

That set up the fourth game against the Fort Myers/Cape Coral Blue Lightning. Both teams entered the game with records of 3-0. We were not as sharp as normal in this game, probably due to playing on one-half hour rest. That, coupled with a very talented opponent, led to a 6-2 win for the Lightning over us.

Our 3-1 record got us into the semi-finals on Sunday. We opened up in a semi-final match against the Stingers. The Stingers are a team we know well having played them three previous times. The girls were  definitely nervous going into this game but they settled down quickly and we had our best performance ever against the Stingers. We played in a very businesslike manner and won 5-1. We made very few mistakes and took advantage of opportunities as they were presented to us.

On the other side of the semi-final bracket, the Cape Coral/Fort Myers Blue Lightning defeated the Falcons 11-3. That set up the rematch we wanted for the National Championship game.

We did not play well against the Lightning on Saturday, losing 6-2. In this game, however, we played a very exciting match and played the Lightning even for almost the entire game. We ended up losing 3-1, but the game was not decided until late. The Lightning are a very talented and deep team but we showed much improvement from Saturday and a lot of fight in this championship game.

We end up in second place for the 3v3 Challenge Sports National Championship.

The girls had a wonderful weekend. Every team in this tournament had good talent. Our competitors were very sportsmanlike. The girls bonded with each other and they got to experience many emotional highs and lows (fortunately many more "highs").