SOCCER FOR 3 AND 4 YEAR-OLDS-WHAT A HOOT!

While I was visiting Kim and her family over the past weekend, I was with them to attend 4-year-old Austin’s soccer game on Saturday morning. They play every Saturday (only 2 more games left for the season). It is so cute to watch, both boys and girls are on the teams. Austin’s team wears yellow shirts and the team that they play against every week wears light blue shirts. First, they practice for about 20 minutes before the 20-minute game begins, and I cannot figure why they do this…they practice on the other team’s goal. They kick the ball into the goal, and when the game officially begins, guess where they are trying to kick that ball? In the opponent’s goal ! Parents, coaches, etc. are yelling ‘Turn around, kick it the other way’, sometimes they hear it and do so, and sometimes they make a point for the other team. Go figure. But the really cute part is how they actually play. Sometimes they’re looking all around, not paying attention, or picking up the ball with their hands and carrying it into the goal (no point). All the parents on Austin’s team are watching Austin if he gets close to the ball, because he usually gets it in. (His dad, an avid soccer player himself, taught him to play since he was old enough to walk.) However, Austin is such a humane being, that at one point he was going after the ball and noticed that another player’s sock was down or something. He stopped in his tracks, bent over, and was raising the kid’s sock while parents were screaming ‘Austin, kick the ball!!’. He didn’t even hear it; when he finished that chore, he found a piece of glass of something down there in the dirt, picked it up and ran it over and gave it to the coach. Then he got back into the game and actually SCORED! What a blast! There is no score kept (officially, that is), but you know each parent is keeping score in their heads, and we were no different. Of course, we knew that Austin’s team won the game, 8 to 2. Austin got 6 scores himself, and of course, after the game, his dad told him that he got 6 scores, so he went around very proud of himself and told all of us that he got 6 points. (As if we hadn't been counting). So cute.