our first team sport- soccer!

Finally the soccer post. Katelyn had a fun season, so we were successful in the first team sport our children have played!

Here she is in one of her first games taking a corner kick- I don't think the ball went much farther! She did improve the strength of her kicks a lot during the season.

Here she is doing her silly run (#27)- half the time she was running around on the field she would flap or circle her arms or swing them crazily! So funny. This is towards the end of the season when she learned to follow the ball more.

doing a throw-in. I didn't really get a picture of her kicking the ball ever, since she never really dribbled it, just kicked it whenever it happened to come to her. :)

lined up before a kick-off. They played 4-on-4 on a tiny field! And I love this picture because she was the tallest on her team by far.

This is her team with their trophies at the end of the last game- 3 of the kids weren't there that night!

So she started out the season halfway paying attention and asking to be put on defense (I think because she understood it better and she's not that aggressive so on offense she hardly touched the ball!) and after the 2nd game I asked her what she liked about soccer and she said "well, it is good exercise." I was not convinced that she was enjoying it! Oh and she told me "if another kid on your team is trying to get the ball, you can let them have it." (so this is why she never really "went after it"!) But she improved and learned a lot during the season and it turned out good.

And it was so cute, she had the nicest coaches. In the last game, she was the only kid on her team who hadn’t scored a goal all season. We didn’t care at all, and we never stressed that with her at all. She was just out there to have fun. But the second half of that last game, her team was dominating like 10-1, and so her coach decided to try to help Katelyn score a goal. He kept telling her to run towards the goal and then he told the boys to kick it to her. Several times it worked, and she had a couple of good shots and a couple of assists (she would kick it toward the goal and then one of the boys would kick it in- then we were all like “great pass Katelyn!”). She didn’t score a goal, but I could see she understood the game better after that, and it was so cute of her unselfish teammates to keep trying to help her. I love 5-year-old kids, they are so cute and accepting of each other. She had fun playing with the kids on her team and I'm glad she liked it overall!