Kate had her very first (ever!) soccer game last week. Unfortunately, her first soccer practice got rained out so they only had ONE practice before games started. And only one kid on our whole team had ever played soccer before. AND, the first team we played against were all 5 year olds who had played together last year. Needless to say, the game didn’t go so well and Kate was not impressed. This picture does a pretty great job of describing her first soccer game…
See the cute kid in pink? See the ball? Yep – that is pretty much how it went.
I will say, the first 20 minutes or so was warm-up and practice. THIS part, Kate loved.
And then it was game-time. Time to huddle up and strategize.
We had 8 kids on our team, and they played 4v4 on a pretty small field. For a competitive person, it was painful to watch. One of our kids cried the whole time she was on the field. One ran around trying to pick it up. Kate kept running off of the field to get a sip of water, or to “rest” or asking for a snack.
She touched the ball a handful of times, but mostly just ran around. At this point, none of our kids really get the concept of soccer, except that you don’t touch the ball with your hands. (Well, we do have that one kid that doesn’t get that part yet either…)
This may be the one time Kate really had the ball! What you don’t see is that when the other 7 kids swarmed her, she stopped, put her hands up and then turned around and walked off of the field. I asked her what happened and she said “They stepped on my toes!”
I sure do love this kid. She may not know much about soccer. Shoot – she may not ever even like sports at all. But that’s okay. One thing that she is great at is making friends. I hope that never changes!
Like the majority of girls, I would read this column occasionally growing up, along with Dear Abby. Sometimes I would think “That’s crazy” and sometimes…