I’m discovering soccer. My kids are younger than most of yours, so you’ve probably been through all this years ago. I never really played soccer, except briefly at Longfellow when Mr. Best tried to teach us all soccer, and for the most part failed miserably. We just didn’t get it. For all the years since in fact I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand the rules, and it didn’t help that almost every time I saw a game on TV they were speaking Spanish at high speed.
But now I have two kids learning soccer, and I’m learning it along with them. I still don’t know what a halfback, or fullback, or sweeper is, but I do know when you do a corner kick or a goal kick or a penalty kick. In fact our local league requires parents to volunteer 3 hours for each kid, so one of the things I’m doing is volunteering as a parent referee for the little kids. I went to a 3 hours class to learn how, taught by this old Scot who has refereed for like 50 years, literally, and who couldn’t help but drift off into one anecdote after another. Picture a Scottish Ronald Reagan of soccer. It was all very confusing, and we tried to keep pulling him back from “the way they used to do it in the select leagues” to “what are we actually supposed to do?” Anyway, by the end of the night I think I got the basics, and since they’re little kids and we’re playing in the “recreational” side of the league (meaning it’s officially supposed to be for fun), I think I can do it. Now all I have to do is find a time when I can fit a game into my weekend schedule! What with cub scouts and life in general, it might be a couple of weeks.
Anyway, just musing out loud. I hope everyone is doing well.
