>>I encourage you to sign Katy up for AYSO. It's good exercise and really good socializing. It's not competitive; no standings are kept and one of the precepts is Everyone Plays. Allie and Emily are still friends with girls they met playing soccer when they were little.
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>>It's also where I got my opinion of Mexican Americans. To be honest I didn't know many Hispanics before soccer. What I discovered is they are no different from anyone else. Parents love their kids. The kids are happy when they score a goal and disappointed when they don't play as well as they wanted to. Kids are kids. Predispositions don't come until later.
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>We signed Katy up for soccer back in the spring. She's in a Saturday program for 4-5 year olds called Soccer Shots. Katy is good at the practice drills.
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>The girls in the program are all pretty good - the little boys are the whiny ones. When a girl gets knocked down, she gets back up. When a boy gets knocked down or trips, he gives a performance similar to what you see in pro soccer.

Excellent!

Don't worry about how good she is. The important thing is to let her make up her own mind. We have had this conversation before so I won't preach.

One of Emily's early teammates was the best player I have ever coached and I didn't have a thing to do with it. People often complimented me on her talent and I said, truthfully, it wasn't me. Her parents met on the track team at Iowa State so she ran like a gazelle. Her father is from Nigeria and her mom is from Venezuela. The last I heard she was on the soccer team at the University of Arkansas. She and Emily were pretty good friends. They were the only two girls on a U-8 coed team which otherwise consisted of unruly boys. The coach noticed I always stuck around for practice and said man, I could use some help. That was how I first became more involved with soccer.

The last team I coached was an accident and perhaps my favorite team. I was reffing one of their games and they didn't have a coach. I asked one of the girls where he was and she said he never shows up. Not to games, not to practice, not to anything. I talked to the coach administrator (Erich Freiberger -- you can guess who he will be cheering for on Sunday) and it turned out the wife of the "coach" had signed him up at registration, they were in splitsville, and he never bothered with it. That is really bad to frag kids but don't get me started. They were a really fun group of kids. My favorite player was a Bosnian refugee named Jovan. His family came here because the Serbs were so busy slaughtering them. He was FOB and didn't understand much English. Sometimes I thought all he understand was "Yes, I understand" when I asked him if he understood. When he scored his first goal he immediately looked to his father on the sideline, who understood even less English than he did. The look between them didn't require any translation. God bless America.