Yesterday was a beautiful day not in the weather sense, but in the community sense. In physical education I have been teaching my KICS students the fundamentals of the game of soccer. We do not have a very big field to play on, but we have made it work, and it has been a ton of fun. Many of the high school and middle school boys expressed they would like to play in a "real" game. So, through a bit of energy on my part, I was able to provide them with exactly that. I organized a game between many of the secondary KICS students and the boys team (they call themselves Wyldfire) I coach during the week. The Wyldfire team I coach were estastic to have a game and to have a crowd of people to play for! This is definitely something they do not always get. So, come game time there was about fifty people standing around the field watching. You could feel the energy. We even had lots of parents and other teachers come out to watch. It was so great to see people in the community come and support. Our Principal, Brian Dolinger, was the coach for the KICS team and I was both the coach for my Wyldfire team and the ref for the game. It was quite hectic to try to coach and ref at the same time. The game started off with my boys doing a great job of spreading out and passing. After four long months of coaching them they have finally caught onto this concept. One of the largest blessings/ problems about coaching in Africa is that you will often have many players who are really talented and have amazing ball control, but they have no concept of how to pass to their teammates. They are what we call in the soccer world "pre-madonna" (I sure hope I spelled that right). Not that they are trying to be errogant about their ball skills, but more so they just have never learned how to play as a team and allow the ball to do all the work/ running. Everyone is a dribbler here. I hope that makes sense. Anyways, so finally for the first time yesterday, I saw them actually passing and playing as a team! It was amazing. Not only that they started scoring, not just once or twice, but they ended up scoring seven times during the game! They kept saying "coach, coach we scored!" To which I responded "yes, yes you did." The final score between the KICS team and my boys team ended up being 7-2. The KICS team gave it their best shot and did an amazing job for never playing together as a team before. Also, every single person who played gave it their best shot. I was really proud of everyone. Yesterday was just so beautiful for me for several reason, most of which I just described. It was also beautiful for the mere fact that I was able to see two big parts of life here in Rwanda come together, the KICS community and my soccer boys. It was just a beautiful thing to see. I wish you could have been there.
