Now that soccer season is over there will be no more running around town for me.  No more scheduling practices, parties and no more stress of trying to get to 2 games in one Saturday.  You see I volunteered as the coach for my 9 year old daughter’s soccer team.  There was a threat of there being no team for her this year if there wasn’t someone to volunteer to coach the team.  Even though I have been the team manager for her teams for the past 5 seasons I had never been the coach.  I took on the task and researched a little about how to set up practices and what drills to teach the girls.  I started with 5 girls and on our U-11 division there are 6 required on the field during play.  So we played our first couple of games with just the 5 girls, no subs.  Boy were they tired.  Well we sent around some fliers through each girl’s school and got another player to sign up.  We also had one late sign up.  So we were left with 7 total. 

You wouldn’t imagine the chemistry you can get with that many girls together 3 times a week and once a week for game days.  There was cattiness, fighting, clicks were formed and all of this happened even with my doing everything I could think of to discourage it.  It got pretty bad some days so much so that practices were starting to become affected.  So I decided to put a stop to it once and for all!  I advised my girls that if they wanted to be rude to each other and mean and nasty then the whole team was going to pay the price and would have to run laps all practice long.  Well, let me tell you it only took that threat and I didn’t have any more problems with the attitudes.  A couple of the girls really hit it off and ended up having a sleepover on Halloween and everything went swimmingly from there. 

I will be coaching next year at the request of many of the parents from the team and from the girls as well.  I never thought I’d be doing this but I am really glad that I did.  We all learned a lot abut soccer and about getting along despite all of the difference in skill and otherwise.  I hope the entire team can stay together next season.  We did not win any games this year but our scoring ability really started to improve toward the end of the season and I know that if these girls stay together next year we will just continue to do well.

I will miss coaching for the next several months and will miss the interaction with the girls.  They were all fun to be around and the stories they would tell about their weekend plans or what happened at school were great!  If you ever get the opportunity to give back to the community and get involved in sports I would suggest you do so.  It was very rewarding for me!

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