April 30th: Lower School Soccer Club

On the last day of April, after a stressful week and a tiring day, playing badminton from 8am to 3pm, i had my 4th appearance at the Lower school soccer club, in which somehow i was looking forward to the whole week, because i had such a fun time the last session. 3 days before the club, i asked mr.wyncoll, how can i get the kids to listen to me, when they're just fooling around doing their own thing? he told me, "kids love competition, so try to make some games, and they'll be more interested, also try to search up some drills to do, and encourage them more"(somewhere along those lines). So yesterday, i was assigned to the station, focusing on ball control, I let them do dribbling exercises, dribbling across cones and back. I let try it a few times, then i told them we're having a competition and i split them to two groups, the first group to finish dribbling through the cones win, but i realized the teams were unfair, the less skilled team didn't even bother to try, i didn't what to do next, but then the whistle blew shortly(thankfully), or else i would've felt bad, letting them do nothing. The next group came, they were 3 girls, around 1st grade, 2nd grade. So i changed the game, a little bit different, i said the three of them go against me! i do it 3 times while each of them just do it once, losers have to do sprints. But half way through, the whistle blew, so unfortunately, we had to end it. But the best part of the the club came, which were the games! My team had 4 kids, 2 boys 2 girls, and they're ALL VERY ATHLETIC. I put that in caps, because they were AMAZING. Before the game, we had a team huddle, i told them to spread around, and pass more, i had they're fastest player play defense, and told them defense is more important than offense, because kids normally have a misconception that scoring is more important. And so that was our game plan, and i told them that we should have a team name, and they came up with the "Chameleons" , and so "1,2,3, CHAMELEONS!" and the game began. Our team played really good offense and which us score a lot of points, no one was standing alone doing nothing, all of them contributed and they were running for the ball all the time. Our defense was unbelievable, when the other team gets the ball we all run back and play defense, we had a couple of big kicks that cleared our area. The highlight of the day was though, when the other team was open just a meter away from the goal, and shoots, Nicholas from grade 1, dashes to the ball and slide tackles the ball and denies it from the going in! That was the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen, I barely even see that in professional soccer! At the end of the game, we finished with a 5-3 astonishing win! Jacob, a 2nd grader, who i am fairly close with because our basketball team had 2nd grade buddies that we spend lunches with and wrote to, i called him MVP, because he scored all 5 points for us, and he was happy and i can see that he was more motivated to play.
My thoughts at the end of the day was: ya, this was tiring after such a long and hot day, but it was worth it, this fun was good because it was guilt free, and we were helping while having fun at the same time. The best part of this club was working with the kids, because kids are so emotional(although they move on pretty fast), and they're simple and it gives me a break from my stressful high school, teenage life, I feel simple just like them. Joining this club is a double win for me, im giving and having fun at the same time. I look forward to the next session!