Names, again

[flea]

Born: Teagan (a girl). Big brothers are Declan and Eoin (pronounced, basically, "Owen.") No, they aren't Welsh, but Canadian of mixed Anglo-Celtic descent (as far as I know).

On Casper's soccer team, ages 3-preK, which in practice seems mostly like older 3s and 4s. Names have only been heard aloud
Girls: Jessica, Caitlin, Ny, and Casper.
Boys: Amir, Ali, Scotty, Jimmy, Grady, Santana.

Casper is kind of one of the Special Snowflakes of the team. But a big percentage of the kids have had some sort of crying meltdown or playing strike at one point or another (Caitlin, Jimmy, Ali (although only after getting accidentally hit in the face with a ball)). Casper has not cried, but does have a strong tendency to wander off the field, sit down, climb into the net, and approach the coach with irrelevant questions and informative statements. Grady is also somewhat prone to distraction. Amir and Jessica are probably the best players (Jessica's dad is the coach, and Amir seems to be one of the older ones).

We need to try and hit the sporting good store and maybe get a little practicing in before Saturday's 9am game. I tried explaining the concept of the game in the car on the way home. I forsee more right field wanderings on Saturday.

Comments

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

I just spent the last two hours trying to come up with an answer for you, but I kept running off on ranty tangents. I will put together something on the negatives at some point.

Here are a couple of the good things. One thing is that if Casper does develop any sort of coordination at all, that combined with 98% percentile height will have future coaches drooling, no matter what sport she tries. You can teach a lot of things, but it's very hard to teach someone to be tall.

The other is something I noticed over the years of coaching women's sports. When I started coaching women's soccer in the early eighties, I experienced a bit of culture shock compared to coaching men's softball. Every male softball player thinks he's a better player than he really is. Often he thinks he's WAY better. What surprised me when I first started coaching women was that more often than not my players had the exact opposite reaction. The women on my team tended to think they were worse players than they really were. It was strange and frustrating. The hardest part of my job was trying to convince these women how good they actually were. We're not talking about underachievers, either. They were almost all in grad school at the time, most of them in the sciences.

I think a lot of that attitude had to do with the fact that most of them had never played much in the way of team sports before, apart from a few who'd played field hockey. The soccer boom was just starting. Rhode Island never even had high school soccer for girls until a couple years after I started coaching. What I noticed over the years was that the women who joined the team later, The ones who played soccer as kids and then in high school and college, were much more aware of and confident in their abilities. (There were even a few who thought they were WAY better than they really were.) How much of that confidence translates to real life I don't know, but it certainly can't hurt.