Olé, Olé, Olé (The Name of the Game)

On July 15-18, Leah and I participated in the MWR* soccer camp at Nimitz Park.  The idea was I would help coach and Leah and Aaron would participate in camp.  There were about 45 kids and one other adult coach plus three teenagers to help (and the MWR Youth Sports Director, Coach Tony,who knows very little about soccer).  The other coach and I split up the kids via age (and sometimes skill level) and I had about 24 kids under the age of 8 on the first day.  Even though the camp was from 9-11am, it was well over 90 degrees.  I was having the kids stretch and warm up when I noticed Aaron wasn't there.  Coach Tony found him on the playground, which is fenced in and within sight of the end of the soccer field where I was.  Aaron told me he didn't want to play soccer, which was a surprise, since he was excited to wear his new orange cleats and he was dribbling the ball around on the field prior to the start of camp.  I don't know if it was the heat, the number of kids, or the sight of the playground (or maybe a combination of the three?) that changed his mind but I let him go play on the playground instead.  The rest of the days he didn't even wear his soccer clothes and he told me he doesn't want to play soccer in the Fall.  [Insert sarcastic voice] I'm just so glad I bought him cleats last month.  Fall soccer sign-ups happen for a few more weeks so I will wait a bit and ask him again.

Leah was eager to play and meet people.  Most of the kids were pretty well behaved; some were a challenge and one, quite frankly, was a pain in the ass.  I think a combination of the heat (I saw the thermometer one day read 99 degrees) and the fact that the activities were planned and the kids couldn't do whatever they wanted weeded out a lot of the troublemakers and by the end of the week I only had about a dozen kids.  Leah did very well in the sense that I couldn't give her a lot of attention, especially the first couple days.  She was just there to run around and have fun, nothing more.

On Tuesday, July 16, a group of Japanese schoolchildren, around Aaron's age, came and joined us for the last third of camp.  There was about 55 of them along with their teachers, a photographer and a camera man.  I have no idea what school or where they were from but there were a lot of them.  Too many to do soccer stuff so we split them up and I had my group do fun little relay races.  They seemed to enjoy themselves.  At the end of camp, the American kids gave the Japanese kids omiyage (pronounced o-me-yah-gee, best described as a socially-obligated souvenir):  baseball caps.  Both the Americans and the Japanese lined up to take a group photograph and that was our day.  I asked Leah if she liked interacting with the Japanese kids and her reply was a guarded yes because she was disappointed that the Japanese kids didn't reciprocate an omiyage gift.  Overall it was a fun but exhausting week.  That heat really takes a lot out of you.  Air conditioning and a shower never felt so good.

*MWR stands for Morale, Welfare and Recreation.  Just as the name implies, it is fun part of the Navy.  MWR provides for things like youth and adult sports but it also arranges entertainment to the base, runs the movie theaters and a couple restaurants and provides access to discounted admission tickets to attractions.