Zander's Inside Voice

I registered Girl for the upcoming spring soccer season. And again, I signed up to be the head coach. Last season I figured out some way to write down the names of the kids on my team, but I didn’t find that way this time, so I just emailed the division coordinator to let him know that I wanted those same kids I’ve been coaching. Since it seems like so many coaches keep their team season to season, I should get my team back as well. At least whoever registers. I know my team wants to stay together.

Boy #3 doesn’t really want to play. He said “Well, maybe I will just play…” and he didn’t seem all that into it. He complained a lot about practice days and game days and all of it. He’s outgrown his cleats anyway and he’s got huge feet, so it would be buying expensive cleats for one 8 week season. I will have him help me coach the team if he’s interested in that.

At the end of last season, I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to ever coach again. Head coaching two teams took too much out of me. I found that I had no patience, no fire for making up plans for practices, and I dreaded practice days. I moved Girl’s team practice more than I should’ve because I was mentally unable to handle practicing with them. But hopefully with just one team again, I will feel the fire I felt last spring. I felt excited to sign up and I am looking forward to seeing the kids again. They are a lot of fun, but also a lot of work.

There’s things that worked well for the first season and last season, but there’s also some things I am going to tweak. There’s a couple of shy kids who don’t beg to play and end up not getting as much playing time, which hinders their improvement. I have others that whine and complain if they come out of the game at all. But as they get older, they will hopefully listen more and stop some of that whining. I also do realize that there’s so much more going on with these kids than just school and soccer.

I am ready to get my Ninja Monkeys back.