On one of these days I started to do the math, and I am currently on the 19th consecutive year playing handball at a federated level.
The last two seasons were bad both in terms of sports and in terms of the good atmosphere in the team.
Because of that, I was considering giving up playing, since this year I was a father again, and now I have two children (one 6 years old and the other 8 months old). However, with the support of my wife and an invitation from a coach who is a friend of mine, it ended up not being this year that I hung up my shoes.
I ended up accepting to play for AD Carvalhos, a club that is currently in the 3rd national division (yes, I decided to change a 2nd division team that wanted me to stay there for a 3rd division team).
It is a club that was created last season, composed of athletes who were 24 years old at most. Although they have not achieved the objective of moving up the division, the club continues to grow in terms of visibility and with a well-defined project.
All this made me accept my friend's invitation to join the team and play a very important role in the growth of the club and the team, since I am the oldest player at 32 years old and being the starting goalkeeper of the team but beyond that I have the role of helping the two goalkeepers who are in the team with me (18 and 15 years old) to evolve and who knows in the future to take my place.
We are currently in the pre-season that started in the 2nd week of August and will last for 1 and a half month (which is a little longer than I'm used to). This decision to start the pre-season at the same time as the 2nd division teams and much earlier than the 3rd division teams is due to the fact that we have the objective of being able to play a lot of training games against 2nd division teams.
At the end of August we played a training game against a team from the 2nd division called CDC São Paio de Oleiros, and we won by 12 goals, having been a game in which all the athletes of our team played, including those of the youth level that are part of from our team.
Last weekend our club decided to organize the club composed of 1 team from the third division (AD Carvalhos) and 3 experienced teams from the 2nd division.
The tournament consisted of semi-finals and final.
In the semi-final we played with the FC Infesta team that is more experienced than us, but we managed to win the game by 6 goals difference.
This was a special game for me because in the last two seasons my old coach didn't believe in me and despite the few opportunities I had I showed that I could handle it, he didn't give me much game time.
In this case I have a coach who has complete confidence in me and wants me to play as much as possible, but in this tournament we also wanted the younger ones to play, because during the year if we can achieve our goal I have to play all the time. will happen.
We started the game very well and quickly won by 10-2, then we managed the result and when our advantage was 5 goals I went back in, because we didn't want to lower it.
In the final match of the tournament, we faced AC Lusitanos, who were made up of very experienced players who knew how to manage game times very well.
We ended up losing the game by 1 goal difference.
We weren't able to start as well as in the semi-final game, but even so, we had almost the entire first half ahead of the scoreboard. However, at the end of the first half we had a decrease in our performance and we ended up going into the break tied at 16 - 16.
In the second half, contrary to the first, we were always behind the scorer, having been losing by 4 goals, but we never gave up and got the tie, but when we had the ball to move in front of the scorer, our inexperience came to the point of up and we made mistakes we couldn't make.
This season promises to be fun in sporting terms.
I'll be posting regularly to keep up to date with how things are going.
