Lessons Learned

So as many of you know our boys play soccer, this has been a fun experience for one of our boys and kind of a struggle for the other. Bridger has always had the best coaches and teammates on his team each year, his team usually wins and he feels proud of himself at the end of each game. Brenden has had struggles with coaches who are reliable or take time to actually coach, he has been on teams with not a lot of talent, where they loose a lot more than they win. This year Bryan decided he would coach Brenden's team to insure he had a better experience. Well we got the team lists showed up for team meeting and of course Brenden's team has had issues. He had two boys move before the first soccer game, and the replacement boys did not show up for practice for a couple of weeks. Their first game they played against the biggest tallest bunch of 1st and 2nd graders I have ever seen. So it was not going as well as we had hoped. I was beginning to wonder what Brenden was getting out of soccer and this whole experience. Yesterday I figured it out, there is a little boy on his team who has some birth defects. He has a hard time concentrating, he runs away from the ball instead of going after it, and he is always too tired to listen to Coach Bryan. In yesterday's game this little boy was standing down by the goal, watching the other boys run around and chase after the ball. The other team got the ball and started going in for a goal, just before it went in this little boy woke up and kicked the ball out causing the other team to miss their chance to score. You would of thought they just won the game, the whole team ran up to this little boy and were jumping up and down around him telling him what a good job he did. My son is learning a lot more in soccer than how to kick the ball and make a goal! And I am very proud of him and his team for unconditionally loving this boy, even though they may not win all of the games.