Jump Start

Since Paul has kick started me on this thing again, I figured that I should post something since it has once again been quite a while since I wrote anything. There were nights when I told myself that I should put up something since there have been some pretty good stories from the first few weeks of soccer practice at the middle school and such, but I never got around to it. So here they are.

I went skiing this weekend at Winterplace with some people from my church, which ended up being pretty interesting in itself. I did the usual skiing, another girl tried skiing for the first time, and the other 3 people all went for the snowboard. Needless to say, I had myself quite the time watching the first-time snow-boarders bite it hard when they were first trying to learn how to walk with the board, and then how to go down a hill. It's kinda like what Paul says about thing that are always funny, and certainly people falling down while attempting to ski/snowboard should be one of the things on that list. I think the best crash that I witnessed was this one girl, who clearly had no idea how to ski properly, starts down this diamond hill attempting to snow plow her way straight down. All you hear is her screaming, "LOOK OUT!!!! AHH!!!!!", and then you see some poor person in front of her skiing correctly, and she catches her skis on the front of that person's board. She looses both her skis and continues most of the way down the hill while he stays upright perfectly fine on his board and continues on down the hill. The last I saw as I went over the ridge on the lift was her attempting to walk back up the mountain and failing miserably. Myself and these two boys next to me from a random church group got a good laugh out of it.

Now for the soccer stories. Today's classic moment as I was breaking up half of the kids for our first large scrimmage on an actual field:
Me: "Alright guys, what positions to you play normally?"
Them: "Defense, midfield, forward, whatever."
Me to an extremely small (barely 4 foot) kid who hadn't said anything: "How about you man, where do you play?"
Him: "I've never played soccer before...what's a forward?"
Me: "...um...just...go up there..."

I've also ended up having to play on a team the past two practices either from odd numbers or from someone getting hurt. It's funny, cause I'll get on the field, and whoever's team it is will be all excited cause they get the "coach" on their team, and then get upset with me cause I won't just go score goals for them. I have to say, I'm having to kind of relearn the game myself, because things that have become intuitive to me (like positioning, simple passing/trapping, soccer-talk) are completely foreign to these boys. I've not had to yell this much this consistently since I quit having to play as a sweeper in my competitive days. But I have to be on their case pretty often, telling people where they should be making runs, when they can turn or have a man-on, all sorts of stuff. Some people are slowly starting to get the hang out of talking with their team, but it is really slow going. The thing that gets me the most is that there is no concept of team defense. Someone will turn the ball over, the person with the ball will be all of 5 feet in front of them, and they'll just stand there and not even go after the ball. It kills me. They'll pick it up quick here now that we've split up teams now though. At least, they better pick it up quick.