...2 days of futballin...

Girls Team 2011

Last year, the bilingual Montessori school in town started a bilingual soccer tournament - which is great for the kids because they don't get to play as a school ever, really. Being the phys ed. teacher makes me automatic coach, which I am fine with. Last year our girls were wayyyy rough because we didn't practice and it was their first year ever playing, but this year we had some practices and pulled togther a pretty good team! In Honduras, its not common or popular for women to play sports, so I love that the girls have the same opp. as the boys to participate and play in this soccer tourny. 

The kids got to miss 2 days of school, which they hated I'm sure, and play against 3 other bilingual schools here in town. The girls ended up with 2 ties and 1 loss and the boys with 3 ties. The only down side of this tournament was ... rules. Evidently, here in Honduras - rules are made to be broken, and when they are broken, there are no consequences. I actually had a dream the night before the tournament that the other teams were cheating really bad (playing older kids, etc) and I got really upset! There was some bad cheating last year, so I kinda saw it coming I guess. 

We were only suppose to have one 14 year old playing on the field at the same time, the rest had to be 13 and under. (Because the other schools don't go all the way up to grade 11 like we do, so they don't want us to benefit from having older kids). So to me, that meant - if you break that rule, the team is disqualified. So the 14 year olds, (3 of them) were begging me all day - MISSSSS please let us all play together, we will win easy if we do that! And me, being the honest coach I am said absolutely not - I don't care if the other teams are playing all their 14 year olds - we aren't. So here we were with all these little tiny guys (mostly 11/12) going up against other teams that are cheating and playing the older kids. So our director shows up for our last game and sees the other teams are "maybe" playing their older boys so she tells me - tomorrow you are playing all of the older boys as well. 

GOOOOOAAAALLLLL

 

So I hate it here that even in a school setting - they are telling their kids/students that cheating/lying to win is more important than following rules. So I hate that my guys had to suffer because we followed the rules - but the next day we played all the older ones and I explained to them why we follow rules and how its unacceptable for the directors of the tournament to even make rules if they are going to be broken. A terrible lesson for the kids - but I hated for them to miss out on the tournament. I hope next year our director shares with them our concerns about the lesson they are teaching and hopefully make changes. Despite all that though the kids had a BLAST and I had a lot of fun getting to know them better and just seeing them play and have fun - def. one of my favorite days of this school year!