Soccer, fall 2010

Soccer is one sport I can get into at the children's level, for some reason (unlike some sports--that's right, I'm looking at you, baseball). This past fall both children signed up again and thanks to some crazy bottom of the barrel scraping, I was the coach for Erin's team of 4-6 year olds. My knowledge of soccer pretty much consisted of: kick the ball toward a goal and don't use your hands. However, soccer at that level doesn't require much more knowledge than that. My group was--how to put this best?--spirited. At one practice I somehow ended up at the bottom of a soccer kid dogpile, struggling to even breathe as they laughed themselves silly atop of me. But they were also awesome and we had a good time. It helped that Danica Kirkpatrick stepped up to help and was an awesome right-hand woman.

Andrew's 6-10 year old team, coached by Jay Estes, also had fun. It was a young team, however, and there weren't too many tallies in the W column for them. Drew started as a goalie (along with Cole Kirkpatrick) and did a really good job. Eventually they brought in another boy and Drew was relegated to 3rd man. He had a positive attitude about it, though, and the coach was pretty complimentary about his playing. He is beginning to get an understanding of the rules of the sport.