New summer, new sports

I apologize for not posting this blog in a while. It's not lack of interest on my part, it's the feeling that once again I am trying to make it up as I go along.

The end of last summer, interest in soccer plummeted. It was as though we were back in year 1 of the four year run that summer soccer had at Trinity Lime Rock. There were at least two Sundays when we were back to the levels of that summer: a couple of kids, one parent, and me, looking at each other, wondering what was wrong and where everybody was.

Anyway, once the summer was over, I asked the kids in the Sunday School (not that there are all that many of them; this is New England, after all) what they thought about soccer, summer sports, etc.

The girls (ages 10 - 14) were initially diplomatic to a fault. Oh, yes, of course they just love soccer, and the summer soccer program, but something had come up that kept them from attending. (like for four straight weeks?!)

Then, when I asked them if they would rather have a different sport, the whole mood changed. YES! Not much question about what had happened. They had voted with their feet.

It took about five minutes before the older girls had settled on volleyball as their sport of choice. That, we can do -- and we will do in August.

The younger boys (small parishes do tend to have these bifurcated age/gender groupings, and you do have to cope with them) initially wanted cars -- like motorized vehicles -- but when they learned that this was not in the cards, fairly quickly they settled on some sport involving a bat and a ball. Maybe tee-ball, maybe something more advanced -- we'll see.

This year, due to a whole rash of major parish activities in June, we're starting the program the first Sunday morning in July -- the middle of July 4 weekend.

Let's see how it goes. In the next few posts, I want to talk about how to organize alternative recreations to be prepared for whoever might happen to show up.

Certainly not just soccer!

While we're very proud of the kids who have developed their soccer skills in our Summer Soccer program, we're now beginning to think that perhaps we're making a bit of a mistake by confining our efforts to soccer.

Likely due to the economy, we're seeing the local travel soccer team unable to fill what are normally two very popular age levels: U-12 girls and U-12 boys. There simply won't be a team for the few U-12 girls who tried out, because there's already a full team of U-14 girls. The few U-12 boys will get to play up with the U-14s, and thereby we will have a U-14 boys team.

With families pulling back on expenses like travel soccer, we also see them pulling back on activities that might lead to future expenditures on travel soccer. And, as a result, our attendance has been off this summer.

Today, I asked the kids what they thought we should do. (By the way, asking the kids is always a good idea in this kind of thing. We'll go so far as to say that if you do NOT ask the kids, you are setting yourself up for failure bigtime. But that's another post.)

The little kids didn't have much in the way of opinions. One six year old girl suggested football, and a five year old boy agreed with her.

The big kids were more forthcoming. Lacrosse (one girl said it is the fastest growing youth sport in America right now) was a popular suggestion. So was beach volleyball. So were ordinary volleyball, badminton, horseshoes, and ... soccer.

Anyway, we're floating a trial balloon on this one, both inside the parish and outside it. Namely: what do you say that we call it Summer SPORTS at Trinity Lime Rock next summer, and we do what most people want to do each Sunday?

Where do YOU think we are going to go with this?