Soccer & Stuff

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

I haven’t found my niche yet. That always takes me a while. I’ve hung out with some people who forgot they were no longer in high school. THAT wasn’t it. I’ve spent some time with the soccer obsessed Senegalese. That was nice, but I couldn’t do it 100% of the time. I have even hung out with two little French punks who took me to a store called "Curious" followed by a gothic bar— surprisingly, a good time. Most of the time I spend is with Tonin and Benjamin. (Plus, we have a wicked deal worked out. They make the deliciously mouth-watering food, and I do the dishes. I can live with that!)


Tonin, whose bedroom door faces mine, is from a town about an hour away from here, and Ben, who lives down the hall from Tonin and me, is from Montreal. The two of them are great, and I usually laugh (and learn) a lot when I’m around them. However, the two of them are in “art plastique”, and therefore, they have a lot of the same classes together. If you put two and two together, you have a pair of fun guys in classes where 98% of the students are female. Needless to say, they meet a lot of girls. And I tend to back out of being a third (or fifth) wheel when they go out to meet with them.




On the topic of meeting girls, it just so happens that I have class during the ONE girls’ soccer practice (sports are scheduled as classes here). Today, at the end of my class, I booted it to a far field where the practice was supposed to be going on for another 45 minutes. I wanted to at least talk to the coach to see if I could practice with the boys at night. When I got to the field, there were only three young boys goofing around. When I asked if they had seen a girls’ team, they responded saying that they had left. The first conclusion I jumped to? There weren’t enough girls, and so the coach cancelled practice. Ugh. That would suck. I went back to campus and sat outside enjoying the 26-degree weather before going to a different field to try to catch the coach at the boys’ class/practice. I explained the situation to the coach, and he said that I could practice with the boys for tonight, and that he would see my level before deciding what to do next. I guess it went decently, because at the end of practice, he asked if it would be possible for me to make at least the last half of the girls’ class each Monday, and said that I could continue practicing with the boys in order to have a full practice. YES! Fantastic! The best of both worlds! Playing with girls who have things in common with me (if only an affinity for soccer), and then playing with boys who will force me to push myself a little harder.

The coach then went on to tell me that the games that the girls play competitively are an out-of-class thing, and those matches happen on Thursdays. You don’t register for that, you have to talk to the coach. If he ends up liking the way I play, then that would be perfect, since I only have classes Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays! The last thing that the coach recommended to me was to sign up for a soccer-coaching course. I brushed off the idea at first, but now I’m seriously thinking about it. He said that for five or six weeks, there would be theory and an exam, but then for the following weeks of the semester, I would be preparing a practice series for youngsters, and then coaching the kids from the primary schools in the area. Could be fun. The coaching certificate is also recognized around the world (this was the coach’s word. I’m skeptical about this, but I’ll look into it.) I think it could be great to do--even though it means giving up volleyball.

The practice itself was interesting. I really went into it with a so-what-if-I’m-a-girl-standing-amongst-a-bunch-of-guys-ready-to-play-soccer attitude. The coach got that attitude as soon as I explained my situation. Some of the boys caught on. A few of the boys were too weirded out to even look at me in cleats. And it took until the end of practice for the rest of the boys to accept the fact that I just wanted to play. Even if it was on gravel, it felt sooooo great to play organized soccer again. And I never thought I'd say it, but it also was nice to do drills!

(On a side note... By the looks of it, I'm going to have a full-out novel by the end of the year, if it continues this way!)