Clarence,
FWIW...
Although I am on my iPad2, your first set looked well exposed, had good contrast, and decently neutral color and WB. Regarding Jeff's comments, we might need to have him explain what he means by washed out. However, the only thing I can think of is that your pics are typically slightly less saturated than many other Canon shooters. You mentioned you shot RAW srgb, realize that the Adobe Canon Raw reader/converter is their interpretation of the raw data, and that they are applying some sort of preset to present that data in LR before you start your edits etc.
Two last comments..
For slightly richer/more saturated colors try +6 to +12 Saturation in LR. However this might even be too much for you tastes compared to what you are use to. If you don't like it, try twiddling with some Vibrance booste instead which will add some saturation to non-skin tones.
And lastly, regarding your histogram, let's team remeber what it is telling us... That is, the number of pixels in the image at each binary luminance vale from (blk) 0-255(white). The rule of thumb that you always want histogram to go all the way to the right, is just a rule of thumb. So your shot example you used seems fine to me with missing top-side histogram and not much in the image warranted full white values. (Take and example where you would capture a shot with fairly unifor color, it will only have a narrow 'spike'. Where you place a shot's histogram (if you we're to play with exposure in camera and not in banded LR editing) would affect the whole image (I know am stating the obvious), but ultimately, the right exposure is the one where most of the image looks right to you, especially skin/faces. Sorry for the ramble.
I thought you had a great set. One thing observation, it seems that VB lends itself to more flattering facial expressions more often (women sensitivity Paul always reminds us of), than say soccer?
