If you read Part 1 of this you can probably guess I am less than thrilled with some of Buddy’s soccer teammates.
This team consists of 5th and 6th graders, so you have “first year players” and you have “second year players.” In most cases, your 2nd years will be “better” than your 1st years. The 1st years have to start out somewhere. They have to learn just as the 2nd year players learned the year before. However, somewhere in the transition to “2nd year player” some players seem to forget what it was like as a “1st year player.”
When Buddy started soccer this year, he was excited. He wanted to play goalie, and he wanted to badly enough that he used his own money to buy goalie gloves. So earlier this week when he wouldn’t even bring his gloves to practice it set off some alarms in my mommy brain. After doing some investigations, both questioning him and asking the adults in his school that we have close contact with, we discovered he was told by some 2nd year players that he sucks at goalie. (Can you hear his heart breaking? Can you hear mine??) To use my sister-in-laws words…”HOW DARE YOU?!” How dare you tell someone who is trying, learning, doing their best, and doing it as well as some of your friends, that they suck? What happened to being a team? Why are they not trying to bring him up? Fill him in on what he did wrong, sure, we can all use improvement. But don’t totally shut the kid down.
It wasn’t just Buddy that they were bringing down either. It was a handful of the 1st year players. Though the whole team has now been talked to, and to my knowledge things are no longer being said to the first year players, Buddy still will not play goalie.
And the game he played…wow it was a doosey. Within the 1st 30 seconds of the game the other team injured our goalie. Buddy was the ONLY player then willing to even get in the net that night! Yes, we lost, but now that we have played that team a 2nd time, we lost again…and this time we lost by even more! I know great news for Buddy, not for team though. My point, though we lost the game he played, he was brave enough to get in the net when there was NO other players that would do it! And yes, we lost, but the 2nd time we played them we lost too.