This past
weekend brought Pip and Polly’s first two soccer games for the spring season. It
was a full weekend for us all.
Pip had a
very good weekend. Not only did he score his first ever (and the team’s only)
goal, but he also began figuring out how to deploy his energies on the field.
In the defensive box he used a combination of confidence and assertiveness to
thwart oncoming attacks. During his quarters upfield, he moved well, largely
avoiding getting sucked in to ball chasing and instead playing his position and
moving into open spaces. It was this movement that enabled him to score the goal
as he and one other player on his team were spread across the top of the box
when the ball squirted along the line towards them. Pip stayed a touch wider
and when his teammate’s shot bounced off the goal keeper, he was able to gather
the carom and lift the ball over the keeper and into the goal. It was not a
very graceful play but more often than not that’s how goals are scored. Pip was
in the right place and was rewarded for it. He also spent a quarter playing
goal during the second game, stopped a couple of shots, re-distributed the ball
well by throwing instead of kicking it, and took command of the defense. The
general success of playing well made the weekend as a whole very fun for him.
Polly also
had a good weekend, though she did not have as many definable moments of
success as Pip. She spent most of her time on the field staying out of the way
of others, moving around but largely sliding to the side before too many people
got around her. Later she told me that she was scared of getting into the scrum
of kids. As the youngest player on the field and someone who has only seen
three to four soccer games in her life, I can’t fault her for feeling that way.
It was the first time she’s been surrounded by such an environment and amidst
the swirling chaos it’s hard to understand the underlying order much less what
one should do to try and shape it. In the Saturday game she had a couple of
chances to stop a ball in the open field and she did well handling it and
sending it back in the correct direction. This leads me to believe that in time
she’ll be more willing to get into the middle of things and work to clear the
ball away.
****
What I find
myself needing to do with Polly now to make her into a better player is to undo
some of the half-decade’s worth of behavioral training she’s undergone thus
far. In other words, I have to encourage her to become more aggressive.
This goes against everything we’ve
done with her since she was a baby. Our family’s general approach to living is
one of exercising patience, calm, and respect for others. These qualities
obviously doesn’t come naturally to children (or us to be honest), and Polly
has been known to jump on Pip’s back for no particular reason or slam down a
LEGO in frustration when it doesn’t go together the way she wants it to. Ava
and I have worked steadily and consistently to replace those impulses with ones
that lead Polly to stop, take a step back, and collect herself when faced with
a problem. And this has largely worked. She’s a kind and considerate friend to
her peers and – when not tired and cranky – a conscientious and respectful kid
with adults. She still gets upset when her LEGOs fall apart, but she doesn’t
slam them about the way she used to when she was younger.
Now, as I
had to do with Pip, I have to figure out how to undo some of this training to
get Polly in the right mindset for the soccer field. In Pip’s case, an
increased familiarity with the dynamics of a game did most of the work. In the
fall he was reluctant to bump into any one because he didn’t want to make them
upset or violate the spirit of the rules. He understands better now the
dynamics of when contact is necessary and useful after getting banged around
some towards the end of the fall season. He came into the spring looking to
make an impact, and he has learned take the ball away from people through them
with determination and persistence. This requires a touch of meanness, a touch
of fury that wills one to keep banging away at things even when the ball doesn’t
immediately do what you want. It also requires finding a touch of darkness
inside yourself that for a brief moment hates the person with the ball and
wants only to exert your power over them. This seemed to crystalize for Pip
during a defensive series during Sunday’s game when it took four tries to
finally dislodge a ball from the box. He went after it each time with a focused
and furious determination that was exactly what he needed in that situation.
Polly
possesses that kind of spirit as well, but it may be some time before she’s
ready to channel it. She loved being able to bounce around on the field and
celebrate when her teammates did something well. She was a happy pixie with a
long pony tail, smiling and laughing and having fun. In some ways I’d rather
her just stay that way, but that’s not going to do her much good as a soccer
player.
At the same time, she’s not yet big
enough to crash into people effectively and not yet strong enough to exert her
will physically in a scrum. What I’ll really need to do with her is get her
comfortable with staring down another player in the open field and sticking her
foot in his way. I guess that will come as long as I’m patient with her. I can’t
let my own aggression undermine the aggression I want to emerge in her.
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