I love soccer, so last fall when Sophia started talking frequently about her friend Ethan's soccer team I got kind of excited. And while it's true that I would absolutely love it if one of my kids fell in love with the game, I have to pat myself on the back for letting my kids decide for the most part which activities they'd like to try. After Sophia had brought Ethan's soccer team up several times, I asked Sophia, "Do you think you might like to be on a soccer team?" Sophia thought for a moment and then said, "No, but maybe I could be a cheerleader at Ethan's games!!" Bummer.
Well, late this winter Sophia decided she would like to take a break from gymnastics so that she could give a team sport a try. The idea of being on a team was quite appealing to her, the actual sport was less important. Soccer it was then! Wanting to stack the deck in favor of Sophia liking soccer as best as we could, Travis and I decided to put together a "team" of our friends' kids. Being the social creature that she is, we figured that Sophia would be more likely to enjoy soccer if she played with kids she knew and liked. (And admittedly, I thought that if I was going to coach a team, I wanted to do it for parents that I knew and liked.) We also bought Sophia pink soccer socks and cleats and the pinkest, most glittery ball we could find in hopes of winning her over to the sport.
I would like to say that Sophia fell in love with soccer the moment she stepped on the field with her pink glitter ball. That would not be true however. She did enjoy the first practice enough while we were focusing on individual ball skills. I was actually impressed with the effort and focus that Sophia was putting into the drills. Then we moved on to scrimmaging. As we got the kids set up to start, Sophia was all smiles...until someone stole the ball from her, which in her mind was just rude. The tears and phantom pains started. And lasted pretty much until the end of practice.
OK, so it hadn't occurred to me that since Sophia hadn't played any competitive sports yet that she might not know about the whole be aggressive side of soccer. So I was hopeful as we set out for the next practice that we would be tear-free since she knew more what to expect. While we were not tear-free, we were tear-reduced. Sophia seemed to have more fun, so that worked for me. As the "season" went on Sophia did manage to make it through most practices without tears and even seemed to enjoy herself, though she did utter the awful statement, "We're girls. We can't run that much." (Trust me, we had a talk after that one.)
If you ask Sophia she will tell you that she really liked soccer, so that's a victory in my books. I hope that she will decide to play on a soccer team again sometime, but for now she has gone back to asking us to sign her up for dance or gymnastics again. Below are a couple of pictures that I shamelessly stole from a friend's blog since I didn't have any of my own. Hope you don't mind, Samantha!
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