a soccer-filled saturday afternoon…
A Saturday afternoon, with the sun high in the sky, and the glare off the sand so bright that you still squint behind a pair of sunglasses (or at least I assume you would considering I had “misplaced” mine at the time). The objective of the afternoon was to conduct a soccer training session with a random assortment of kids gathered from the local villages. Bennety assured me he could arrange this so a little after 1:00 that day we all piled into the truck and drove towards the soccer field. We assumed no one would yet be there considering we are working on Africa time and promptness is not synonymous with start time for anything. However, as we pulled off the main gravel road to the school area we saw twenty plus kids gathered around one end of the soccer field. A cheer went up when they saw our truck and some kids were even doing flips. Needless to say they all seemed excited to be there and we were excited that they were excited. However, rather than stopping, we continued up the hill to collect Bennety and the soccer gear and when we came back a few minutes later I swear the numbers had multiplied.
All the kids stayed a distance from where we stopped the trucks but knocking some balls out onto the field quickly broke the ice. I should say the group was all boys of varying ages, heights, and ability with bare feet and keen to play. I had hoped girls would come out to play and a group did show up but wanted the soccer ball to go play netball which is the sport of choice for girls in Caprivi. Ah well. So it goes.
Anyway, looking over the 25 or so players we had and trying to figure out the best way to start we delved into 5 versus 2 keep away games although this took a bit of time and explanation, which was a bit harder considering the language barrier but Bennety was incredibly helpful…and once I realized some of the boys could understand me (a feat considering few adults can due to my accent) that made it easier. Hand motions came in very handy and smiles seems to work pretty well too. In any case, the exercise went ok… I left Bennety with a group, took a group myself, and left Deb, Greg, Jg, and Luke in charge of another. It was an interesting experience to come up with drills on the fly, manage the separate groups, and figure out the translation barrier on a rolling basis but fun nonetheless. Eventually, as the number of players continued to expand, we broke them into groups of 3 and 4 and played small-sided games.
Kids continued to wander out from wherever and within a short period of time we had two healthy groups of 20-ish kids on either end of the field – one group doing shooting and passing with Bennety, the other group small-sided stuff. We then decided to make it a full fledge 11 v 11 game and passed out jerseys which kids were super excited about. By now there had to be about 50-ish kids of all ages roaming about – everything from a two year old with sagging pants to fifteen year olds too cool for words but eventually dropping the facade and jumping in to play
.We let the two teams play for awhile, encouraging them to run their little hearts out, because we then pulled a few players and formed a team and played against another group. That was a ton of fun and our team had the upper hand for a bit, scoring a few goals and not having serious issues with pace. However, the players on the opposing team mysteriously kept getting bigger (as older boys continued to arrive) while our team was spending more and more time with hands on the knees. We wound up tying the game b/c by the time their third goal went in I think our team was pretty much acting more like stationary cones rather players. At the end of the day everyone was tired (or at least our group was…) and I think had enjoyed the day.
