Chaos: Soccer for Three-Year-Olds

 

So, when we got our flyer from our YMCA about youth sports for spring, I noticed that one of the options was soccer for three-year-olds. Hey, I have a three-year-old! Maybe she likes playing soccer! There's only one way to find out.

It was cheap and it was only five Saturday mornings, for forty-five minutes per Saturday--twenty minutes of practice followed by a twenty-five-minute game. 

This being Minnesota, the March-April season is actually called "Winter II Soccer" and is held indoors at a local middle school.

The coaches are volunteers and the first week Cora's team didn't have a coach. I couldn't volunteer myself because (1) Geoff was on call three out of the five weekends, so I needed to be able to take over Hazel care right away if his pager went off, and (2) I know almost nothing about soccer, not even the fundamentals. Luckily after the first week, one of the other moms stepped up. She said to the rest of us, "Bear with me, I don't know what I'm doing," but she did great.

The first week all four of us went, and Geoff and I took turns wrestling Hazel on the sidelines and in the hallway. She is old enough that if she sees other kids running in a big open space, she wants to run too, but too little to understand why she can't. After the first week, when Geoff had seen where the school was, he decided it was close enough that he and Hazel could stay home and call me to come home immediately if he got paged. So these photos with Geoff in them are all from the first week.



Generally Cora did fine during the "practice" portion. With a little encouragement from me, she would follow instructions on the little drills, like kick the ball back and forth with your partner, line up and take turns kicking your ball into the goal, etc.

Once it was "game" time, though, and they'd put the ball down and turn the kids loose on it, some of the kids came alive and were right on it, and Cora pretty much lost interest. Increasingly so as the weeks went on. I think she did not like the contact sport aspect of it. She loved running around the big open court and would run and run in circles and figure-8s, and I was glad for her to have the exercise, but she was almost oblivious to the simultaneous soccer game that was going on in the space.

These shots from the first week were the most game participation she did.

 

I did get her to line up to shake hands with the other team each week. 

Cora's favorite part about soccer was that she made a little friend, and looked forward to seeing her each week.

So, all in all, not a bad first sports experience--a bit of exercise, a bit of socializing, a bit of following instructions. I don't think, for now, that soccer is Cora's sport and even if we were still going to be living here I wouldn't sign her up for the summer session, but I'm still glad we did it.