The two options still available to us at the time were tee ball and flag football. Knowing that his hand-eye coordination aren't yet at a competitive level, I decided on football. How hard can it be?! They're 4 and 5 year olds! It's basically sharks and minnows on land with a ball, right? Wrong. On the first day of practice the coach hands me a paper with lots of little circle and line drawings and says "These are some simple plays that we'll be running, if you want to practice them with him." Uh... whaaa...?
Long story short, my kid hasn't got the slightest clue what is going on. I think it's giving him some anxiety at practice and at this morning's game he wouldn't even go out onto the field. Everywhere he stands is always wrong. A couple of the other kids, who are already gearing up to be the next Johnny Football, will even yell at him for not being in the right spot. When he does play, he has decided that the best approach is to not move at all from the spot the coach has placed him in. As an entire play is running, my child remains firmly planted, hands on knees.
I could care less that he isn't good at football. He's only four, for crying out loud! But I hate that he's not having any fun. Instead of solving my first problem, I've created another one. FAIL. I would just quit but A) I feel like that is a poor lesson to teach him and B) there are only 6 kids total on the team. If he quits and someone else can't play for some reason, the entire team wouldn't be able to play. This is going to be a very, very long season.
Here is a video of his first game where he actually did have some fun. He's #9. In the second play he runs a bit, falls down, then gets up and dusts his hands off because he just did some major work. It's cute.
-Hugh Jass
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