First week of Soccer

Robert was in soccer last year and has talked about it ever since. I thought that Hailey should have a chance to see if that is what she likes also. Well, a couple of weeks after I signed them up, I get a call informing me that Hailey's team doesn't have a coach. I told them that I could do it if no one else would but to keep calling. She said there was only two left to call and she has left messages with them already (not a good sign). I thought it over then talked with Nathan and decided that I could try. So that's how I became Hailey coach.

I schedule my practice time to be right after Robert's so we would have only two days of soccer (practice and games are once a week). The first practice was interesting. I wanted them to learn each other's names first so we got in a circle to kick the ball to each other while saying the names. No one really said each other names, so I said them. Then we tried Red Light, Green Light but the kids did hard kicks and the balls were out of control. We then paired up and passed the ball to each other then took a step back. Finally, we played Bunny Tag where the IT person hopped to tag the other players while they dribbled their ball.  By the end of the 30 minute practice I felt a little discouraged about how practice went and how to do another. My games didn't take as long as I hoped they would.

Robert had his game first. His team is blue. Whenever his coach knelt down to talk to them, Robert went to sit on him. It showed pretty quickly that Robert has done soccer before and none of the other kids have.

 Robert did great and kick the ball from the middle and just missed the goal by two feet.

 Then at 2:00pm it was Hailey's turn.  Our game consist of four 8-minute quarters. There is supposed to be a 1-2 minute break between each quarter and about 3-5 minutes for half time. So the total game should take 40 minutes. Our first game took about 1 1/2 hours. We had a late start due to field confusion. Also we are supposed to sub out players every 4 minutes which takes time. Neither coach really knew how the game was supposed to go but the kids did have fun.  We aren't supposed to keep score but the kids did and told me that we lost 4-7. 

Since I can't really take pictures during the game and Nathan is busy watching Hannah, I could only take pictures during half time. The kids wanted to practice scoring.

 One of the girls has the bad habit of picking at her nails, so during the game she started bleeding. Also another one of the boys wanted so bad to be the goalie (which isn't for our age group yet). He got very upset when the other team started scoring. I'm kind of glad to see that melt downs are just apart of Hailey's age group and not specific to her.