Soccer got no succor

I'm beginning to come to terms with the fact that I just may have started this blog thing solely for the cheap thrill I get out of creating painfully bad entry titles.

Wow was today not so autumnal. High in the mid-80s on October 6th? WTF?

We made our second attempt to inculcate Max into the world of organized sports by bringing him to his second Super Soccer Stars practice (class?) this morning in Prospect Park. Well, I guess it wasn't his second -- he had gone to 3 or 4 over the summer, but this was his second of the so-called autumn season where the group size is much larger. Super Soccer Stars, for the uninitiated, is soccer initiation for the pre-school set. Every Saturday morning, for 45 minutes, three or four fairly-talented soccer dudes run the kids through goofy drills as a means of teaching them basic soccer skills and concepts. The class begins and ends with a singing of the Super Soccer Stars song, sung to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it." ("we never touch the ball with our hands.."). Max had seemed not too into it when Cathleen had brought him over the summer, except for once when it was just he and his friend Henry there. We figured he'd be into it this fall, maybe, because Henry and another friend were going at the same time. Three weekends ago was the first class. There were over a dozen kids, and Max was visibly overwhelmed from the get go. He insisted on having either me or Cathleen stay with him (not at the field, which all parents have to do, but physically within the class), and he pretty much refused to participate in any of the drills/games. We stuck it out for the entire class, with Max basically watching the other kids kicking the ball around, and then after much debate decided to give it a second try. Today was that second try and produced the same result, and I threw in the towel ten minutes into the class. It is not on my agenda to make my son miserable if it can be avoided. Max takes a while to adjust to new groups of kids (a concern he clearly articulated to me this morning as we were getting ready to go), and I think that in the back of his head he was probably thinking, "what is up with a game that deprives me of use of my frisbee-catching hands?" He had much more fun sitting in my lap, observing an ant that was crawling all over his hand and arm. When the class was over, he still wanted to go and get some stickers that the coaches hand out at the end. No play, all reward. That's my boy.

We returned to Prospect Park in the afternoon for a get-together with our neighbors Jessica and kids Sophia and Jack and had a significantly-improved experience. Sophia is a few months younger than Max, and they simply love each other. They played nonstop for a couple of hours, allowing me to beg off on a tough run around the Park loop in the sweltering heat (after I had biked Max to and from the Park this morning, and then had run Eliza up to the Park in the jogging stroller for the afternoon get-together).