Friday, November 21, 2014

For The Love of The Game

If you had asked me a year ago if I would ever want to coach a soccer team I would have told you that I wasn't sure, but I doubted it. Mostly because I doubted my abilities and qualifications. Now, re-wind to the beginning of September, my neighbor told me that the local parks and rec was having a shortage of soccer  coaches. We had played together on the same adult league in the spring, so he knew that both Brandon and I play. When my neighbor first told me about the shortage I responded, "I don't know..." and somewhat forgot about it. Then, that next Sunday, a lady at church found out I played soccer and told me about how they're needing coaches for the rec league. Apparently they were really struggling to find enough coaches. Finally, I let myself play with the idea of coaching.

Soccer is my passion and has been for years and years. I've played since I was five (or six, either way it's all "bunch ball" at that age) and I continue to play when I have the chance. I've played rec league, travel ball, with my middle and high schools, and then I was able to pursue my dream of playing collegiate ball.

The idea of coaching intimidated me, yet I started bubbling from within of excitement when I thought about it with serious consideration. After asking some questions and some contemplating, I decided to give it a go and asked Brandon to be my assistant coach. We were going to be coaches for a U10 girls soccer team. I then began getting excited about getting to teach the girls about my passion and, maybe, hopefully, light that same passion in them. I was hoping they would be excited about the sport as I am and want to learn. I also hoped that I could somehow shine a light for Jesus with these girls and their parents. But I also began feeling a little fearful of if I could actually do this job and do it well. I know the game hands down, but creating practices, being in charge of the strategy of the game, and being in charge of 10 8-9 year old girls?? It started to make me wish I had taking the coaching class when I was back at Tennessee Wesleyan College (TWC). I began looking things up and creating my first practice. I was excited and nervous, but mostly excited.

To my dismay and surprise, I discovered that pretty much all of my team was fairly new to the sport and had absolutely no fundamentals. I had previously figured we'd go over them and perfect them the first couple of weeks and then move on. My expectations were a little too high. I noticed a couple girls had potential, but I'm not sure that anyone knew not to kick with their toe! Oh my gracious, that was painful for me to try to get them to break that habit. And if you've ever seen someone just trying to learn to kick a soccer ball properly, just to pass it, it's kind of awkward. They have trouble with opening their hips and kicking with the right section of the inside of their foot, all so that the ball will go where they are trying to direct it. But it's not impossible. Just takes a lot of patience and perseverance.

I discovered a lot of things about teaching and working with 8-9 y/o's. Their attention span, if any, is extremely short. If your eight year old can pay attention for longer than 30 seconds, then kudos to you! They talk. A lot. And they all try to talk to me at the same time, and if they're not getting heard right off, they'll just speak louder. Goodness. They have not quite reached the capability to settle disputes among themselves, like who gets to do the throw-in or goal kick. They also get side-tracked really easy, that kind of goes with the attention span one.

I was prepared to lose our first game. The girls were just learning how to kick properly and dribble. But I was viewing the game as a trial-run, to see what kinks really needed to be worked on and who played where the best. We hadn't even gotten to the point of defending, being a forward, throw-ins, kick-offs, passing, shooting, etc. I hadn't even had a chance to work with the goalkeepers, at all. So, you see, we had a looooong way to go. We got beat pretty good the first game.....and the next....and the next. You can see how the pattern is going, don't worry, it doesn't really get switched up. Unfortunately.

As the season went on, I continued to try to have an upbeat attitude about the team and our games. I didn't want my frustration to be obvious to the girls, but to continue to encourage them to play better and better, but also to have fun. If they're not having fun, then why play? Plus, if they're not enjoying it now then they probably won't continue to play. Towards the last few games I was getting hugely frustrated and just downright mad at some points. Sometimes I felt like all the practicing we were doing hadn't made a lick of difference, at least for the majority. However, with this league each team plays each other twice. So my goal was to not let the other team score as many the second time as the first game. I mean, there's only so much I can do coaching them from the sidelines. But somehow, we did improve. It was slow and painful and frustrating. But little by little the girls quit running in packs down the field. They slowly (even though it took some reminders from me and Brandon) learned and remembered to stay behind the half line if they were defenders. That toe though. And believe it or not, the girls sometimes would actually kick properly.

The girls would get frustrated, unable to understand why we kept getting the beat. Even a couple said the field hated us or was cursed :) The thing was that they were just so far behind in understanding the game and using the proper techniques. Granted, they are 8 years old and they're just learning the game and some for the first time. I had to remind myself of that frequently. However, we were at a severe disadvantage when it came to a couple of the teams we were playing against. These teams did very well and had a couple girls that could just take the ball down and shoot decently. We discovered that these teams were hand picked, so they were stacked (and did travel ball together) and the rest of us were just out of luck. I basically had the leftovers and all the youngest. But I came to love the girls and wanted to push them to be better. In a way I enjoyed the challenge of only have a couple of truly experience girls and the rest starting from scratch.

Last night we had our last game of the season. We lost. But I was so so proud of them and so pumped of how we did! The end score was 3-2. That's the best we had done all year! Yeah, we had a few toe balls in there. But everybody was throwing the ball in properly, my goalkeepers learned and remembered they could come to the edge of the big box to throw, we even began passing a little, we learned how to "mark up", we learned how to be aggressive yet not overly and become dirty, we were doing so much better at defending. We learned a lot and I'm a proud coach. If I'm able to coach next season, I would hand pick those girls in a heart beat.

I surprised myself in a way of how much I enjoyed coaching. I knew I would love being around the game so much and I love to help people learn about the game I love, so why wouldn't I like it?I have learned so much about coaching and I know I still have a ways to go, but I've enjoyed all of it. I've wondered if the parents like me enough to have me coach their daughter again or if they'd rather not have to deal with me again. Last night, one of the moms asked if I would be coaching again next season, and that was all I needed to hear to know that I did do something right and I must've done a good job.

Coaching has made me appreciate all the hard work that my coaches in the past have put in. Larry Fowler, Tom Gorman, TJ McCallum, Naomi Clarke. Shout out to all them for doing such an awesome job of being a mentor to myself and all other players that they have coached. It's amazing what an impact you can put on someone as a coach and I can only hope I'll be as half of a good as a coach as they were to me. There were many times when I'd walk the sidelines talking to my players and wondering if this is what Coach Clarke felt like and looked like, and I could only hope that I could emulate her. It's funny that I remember when I played in college, and during preseason or regular season we all thought Coach was nuts or we were mad at her for something, but nevertheless we respected her. But now that I'm in that position of being a coach, I understand what it's like to be in those shoes. At least somewhat. Who knows where this coaching career will take me... :)

(Somehow my eyes managed to be shut. We're also missing two girls. Unfortunately, this is the only picture I have.)

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