4-Year-Old Soccer

[Sarah's been after me to post this for a couple of weeks now] [edit: apologies for the multiple posts, if more than one shows up in your feed reader... My posting tool was having technical issues...]

Simon's playing soccer this year. He's four. He's one of the youngest on his team, but nobody on the team is older than five. This makes the games interesting--at one point in the first game the entire swarm of players surrounding the ball had moved thirty yards out of bounds and was still gleefully kicking the ball back and forth--ignoring the shrill blasts of the whistles from both coaches.

Anyway... Simon had practices for two or three weeks prior to his first game, and of course in practice they took turns with the ball, learning to dribble and shoot. This became an issue when it came time to actually play, because suddenly there were no more turns--it was every (little) man for himself. Simon simply couldn't handle this, and spent the first half of the first game in tears, unable to understand why he wasn't getting his turn with the ball.

Part of the issue was that Simon and Samuel both play at the same time, so Sarah and I have to split up, with one of us watching Sam's game and one watching Simon's. That first game started with me sitting on the sidelines of Sam's field and Sarah with Simon--and unfortunately Simon doesn't respond as well to Sarah as he does to me. A short while into the game, then, we traded places, and I tried to explain to the sobbing Simon the concept of competition ("the red shirts will try to take the ball from you, and you try to take the ball from them") and teamwork ("all of the green shirts are helping you to get the ball to your goal, so if one of them has the ball you don't want to take it from them").

I thought that he finally had it, and he went back in to play. He seemed to be doing fairly well until his team kicked the ball out of bounds and the other team was getting set up to kick the ball back in to play.

At that point, I think that he decided that he hadn't had enough ball time, and that it was his "turn". He ran over to the ball, got behind it, and started dribbling it down the field--toward the other team's goal. He was three-quarters of the way down the field before his coach managed to catch up to him and convince him to stop, but he looked satisfied.

Finally he had gotten his turn with the ball.