Saturday, May 12, 2007

Another Soccer practice

Well after the vacation break we were back to the local community center for another soccer practice. After missing two weeks I was curious if the staff had started to figure out how to coach three year olds.

The verdict is in. And it is no. They're not evil, or incompetent. They're just teen aged city staff (read summer job people) hanging out with the kids. But they just don't seem to understand the attention span lengths they're dealing with.

Each week they spend (read waste) 5 to 10 minutes trying to get the kids into a circle and pass a single ball around. So in case you don't quite grasp the difficulty. Here are the steps involved in this drill:
(a) Herd the kids
(b) Form the circle
(c) Show the ball and explain the drill
(d) Repeat for the kids who weren't paying attention
(e) Pick the most timid kid first
(f) Manually move the kids leg to explain that whole kicking motion
(g) Re-herd the other kids
(h) Re-form the circle.
(i) Kick the ball.
(j) Some kids run off to get the ball that they all missed.
(k) Re-herd the kids
(l) Re-form the circle.
(m) Try to get they're attention
(n) Re-form the circle.
...
DING times up. Move on to the next drill.

Now imagine what the class is like. You only had to read that list. And let's be honest by (d) you were probably bored and skipped it. Picture twitching and hyper three years who just want to kick the ball.

But it's not all bad. BigE had a little bout of shyness to start this soccer practice. We missed the first five minutes when he didn't want to play. That was ok. But I informed him that we could go home but we would not play with the pirate ship instead.

Realizing there wasn't going to be a better activity in the next 30 minutes he decided to join in. Then it became the running practice. But as he ran circles, largely ignoring the soccer ball, he was having a blast.

He did join in to cheer GOOAAALLLLLLLLLLL! Even if the other team scored. Thankfully that's enough to keep us happy with it for now.

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