Soccer

Yesterday’s soccer game with our kids was, well, interesting. It might have been more fun had more than three people from the opposing team been there.

While our team gathered in rather quickly, the other team they were scheduled to play didn’t so much. For the longest time there was only one player, which eventually became three… to our eight. At first I thought that maybe the coaches would decide on a three to three strategy, however he grabbed our two boys and one of the girls and had them go over to the yellow team to play with them. So we got up and moved to the other side. Honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest which team they were on, but that they got to play. Once it was time for the game to start, the real trouble began.

It was a sea of blue out on the field, as our team of three and four year olds was basically playing each other. Why? All three of the yellow team members were in full breakdown mode. One of the kids was asked why he didn’t want to go play on his team, to which he responded between sobs, “I don’t have a team!” One didn’t want to leave her mother’s side. And the third was probably too shy to be the only yellow member out there. So the game starts and within two seconds our Logan has the ball, heads straight for the goal and kicks it in. Score!

Eventually all three of the yellow team made their way onto the field, after a little liquid courage in the form of juice packets. One was only out for a few moments but was so distraught after losing the ball she didn’t make it back in for the rest of the game. The other two seemed to require extra liquid courage after each goal was scored. All in all, between the drama and excitement, it was exactly like a grown-up soccer game. Except that Logan and Josh were in it. And they were awesome.

While there are still a few little quirks we need to work on, like not tackling your team members to take the ball away from them but instead work toward getting the ball to the goal together, I think they are really getting the hang of the game. I’m not expecting them to be really into soccer or anything, but I hope they both realize that it isn’t that important who wins or loses in a competition, but rather that they work together as a team and follow through with their commitments.

Starting a Softball “League”

First of all, anyone who knows me pretty much knows I’m not all that into playing sport. Second of all, I didn’t sign up for this.

A couple months ago my partner put out a signup sheet in the lobby area of our church for anyone who was interested in starting a team to play softball. This was just a way to get people together to play, not so much for competition. So after nearly filling up the sheet with names of prospective players he checked into the cost for joining a league. Sticker-shock would be an understatement.

After making a few phone calls he found that there were official city leagues and then there were some unofficial leagues too, mostly from smaller churches. The cost for those was much easier to stomach, but they played every Sunday afternoon from May through August and, well, that posed a bit of a problem. You see, our church is kind of funny about making commitments, especially weekly ones during the summer when a majority of people take vacations, or perhaps if they are in the choir, just taking a little break from church while on summer hiatus. He called a meeting and it was agreed that if they could find other churches to play once a month that would be ideal and forget about a league.

So back on the phone my partner went to find out if any other churches were interested in a very informal League of Nonaligned Churches and found a couple interested in playing. Dates were chosen and just like that four games were scheduled. Now, time to get everyone together to practice which should be simple, right? Ha.

May is a busy church month, or at least it seems to be in ours. With so much going on it can be difficult to plan on getting everyone together for a practice, and after many reschedules, yesterday was the first one. Let me just state for the record, I did not put my name on the list nor had any intentions of joining this team. I did state that I would be in the crowd and there for moral support, maybe even go so far as being a batboy/waterboy, but participate? As in actually play? I don’t think so.

Somehow I got conned into going to practice. Okay, so maybe I was curious to see how well other people were at this whole thing because I seriously don’t know how to play softball, let alone any sport other than soccer and that is just because I played it for a couple years when I was a kid. But alas, at practice after playing catch for a while, we switched to, uh, I think the word is scrimmage? I don’t know… sports term. Anyway, we pretended to play a game and rotated between batting, bases and pitching. This is where I informed everyone that I will pretty much swing at anything that doesn’t hit the ground first and wasn’t kidding about that fact. But, I have to say that even with my erratic swinging I hit over fifty percent of the balls thrown in my general direction so I must be like an athletic whiz, right?

I guess we’ll see how well this whole “league” thing works out. But I have to say, it was fun just getting out and playing with a bunch of great people. Hopefully I don’t break under pressure and totally bring down our team with my lack of ability! Then again, we are playing against other churches that have the same philosophy of playing ball together that we do in that we’re there to have fun, not be competitive. Wow, three thats in one sentence. Now I only hope my competitive streak doesn’t kick in and completely ruin everything!