Soccer

Earlier this year I had a friend mention to me about his son playing soccer with Upwards. I thought it would be something that the kids would enjoy so we went to one of the tryout nights so that they can see what skills and abilities each kid has so that they can try to even the teams out to some degree. Thankfully they allowed the kids to be on a team together. We met our teammates and coaches at practice and started working on our soccer skills, which I have no idea about anything that they were learning. We also learned that our team name was going to be the lil monkeys. The season seemed to go by extremely fast and the kids actually had a lot of fun. I wanted so bad for both kids to score and as the season progressed it seemed more and more unlikely that it was actually going to happen. The kids had a couple of kids on the team that were much better than everyone else and they seemed to keep the ball and never pass it to any of their teammates. I understand that it is hard for kids at this age to understand teamwork, but sometimes Brinley and Landon were wide open and had a easy score but nobody would pass the ball. A couple of times I actually got really upset when the kids were going toward the goal and one of these kids on their team took the ball away from them. The other side of it was that because they had these good players the team was always on the winning side of things, although they don't keep score. Here are a bunch of pictures from our season.

The kids were excited after their first soccer game.

For the last game they had a tunnel and smoke machine for all the kids to run out of and have their name announced.

Here was one of the times I was talking about. Brinley had a breakaway and then her teammate swooped in and took it before she could kick for the goal.

Some of the family members would create a little tunnel for the kids to run under after the game. The kids thought it was awesome and were always so excited about it. Sometimes the other team would even come run through the tunnel.

At the celebration pizza party after the last game.

2017 Upwards Lil Monkeys

We had quite a few people come out to watch the kids play during the season. They enjoyed having a pretty big cheering section for this game. I think MiMi came to almost every game. 

At the end of the season the kids both said that they had a lot of fun and wanted to play again next season. At least they enjoyed it and that is in all honesty the most important thing. One thing that I was really proud of was that Brinley won the Christ-like award one game because she helped her teammates and opponents up every time that they fell down. It got to be excessive in later games because the ball would be right beside her and she would skip on kicking the ball to go help someone up. We just need to work on kicking, passing and ball handing skills before next season. Thanks for reading and God bless!