After 4 days with barely any coaching, we were happy to be getting back into it today, with what we thought would be 2 crèche classes, and a decent after school session.
We were due to meet Joe at the Brooklyn Communicare Office at 8:45, so he could take us to Ysterplaat crèche for 9. But he was running a bit late so Martin had to nip inside the office and ask for directions to the crèche. Thankfully it was only round the corner, so easy to get too.
After introducing ourselves to the teachers and the 2 classes, we took the first class outside to start our session. Now, we thought that the younger age group from Goodwood were a bt slow, and weren't able to understand us. Ysterplaat was pretty much the same. It must be something about that age, although the year aboves were absolutely fine. Odd.
Anyway, we started off with our traffic light game, where Red cone = Run, Blue = Walk and whistle meant stop. They managed to get the hang of it with a fair bit of encouragement, but they seemed to have lots of fun which was nice to see, and was the reason we were out here, to get the kids to have fun.
We then went into a relay style game. Big mistake. After explaining, and demonstrating, and emphasising plenty of times that only the person holding the cone could run, as soon as Martin blew his whistle to say go, half the class started charging down for that cone! We decided that we'd hold the hand of the 2nd person in each line, so they physically couldn't go, which surprisingly worked really well.
We then ended with out classic rolling the ball in a circle game, which the kids loved, like all the kids out here, which was good. We then had a photo with them, and took them inside.
Out came the second class, who were the same age as the first one. We decided to simplify the traffic lights game, by only using the whistle. Martin would tell the kids what movement to do, like run/walk, and the whistle meant they'd have to stop.
While he was doing that, I was walking round with the kids, and noticed a load of shattered glass on the floor in the corner of our area. As half of these kids were barefoot, and it was in the area we were using, I needed to clean it up. Thankfully, while I was brushing the glass away, Martin managed to drag out the first game, until I was done. Which was good.
We decided to skip the relay races, as there wasn't much time left, so went straight into the ball rolling game which, again, they loved. They were a lot better at not reaching out and grabbing the ball off eachother than Goodwood too, which made our job easier. After that, it was photo time, then a goodbye.
While chilling in the staffroom, Joe said that we had to go in a minute to our final crèche session. What? We'd already done Ysterplaat 1&2, like we were scheduled to do.
Turns out, there were 2 Ysterplaat crèche's, the other just round the corner from us, so we weren't done with the crèche's for the day just yet. That's alright, we thought, keeps us busy. So off we headed to our final crèche session.
This class. Were a dream. They were nice, funny, enthusiastic, well behaved, understood everything we asked them to do. It was quality. I had a lot of fun at that crèche. We even got them singing! We would sing a tune and they'd echo it back to us. It was quality. We decided to do the running to the cone game. Where they would be moving around the middle, then when Martin blew his whistle, they would have to run to a cone as fast as they could. They loved it. That's where we slotted in our singing session, too. Even when we were sitting down, Martin would be pulling faces behind my back, and we did this Pantomime-esque thing with them where I would look around, and he wouldn't be there, and the kids would be shouting and pointing at him. My days it was brilliant. We both loved it. Sadly, after the relay races time was up. So again, we took a photo with them, and said our goodbyes. What a class.
Then came Goodwood College. Now we had no idea what sort of numbers to expect, as Joe wasn't too sure himself. He mentioned 60 kids, which took us back a bit, but you never know what to expect.
Turned up, about 60/70 boys and girls were there, all wanting to be coached. With 5 balls. Ugh.
Now, the school lessons finished at around 1:30, the time we started, and we were scheduled to finish at 2:30, the time their school actually ended. As it turns out, Densel, the coach from Saturday, was running an after school programme with this school, and we were just there to pretty much get attention for it. What they actually wanted us to do, was basically supervise the lads playing football, until 2:30, which is the time they were allowed to go home. Fair enough. We divided the teams, and ended up with about 4 teams of 12. 12 a side on 2 pitches? Bit iffy but okay. Oh no, not that easy. They were maintaining one half of one pitch, so that was rendered unusable. Then Densel took the girls and coached on one half of the other pitch, rendering that unusable, so we had two 12v12 games, on one half of each pitch. To say it was a bit hectic was an understatement. Oh well, 2:30 came and we headed home for the day.
Before we left, Joe mentioned something about the need of someone creating a professional football team, to compete in Cape Town with Ajax, which would be a crazy cool project to work on, in my opinion, if the financial support was there. Got me interested and thinking. Sadly I'm just a student volunteering, so any chance of me starting up my own football team in Cape Town will have to wait. Sorry folks.
Home. Haircut. Arsenal game. Now, I would've posted yesterday, as I was planning to do it after the game. But I was so angry with the performance I was in no mood to post. My bad. Sorry. But it was a shambles. We let in 3 goals to a team who had only scored 4 in 6 games during the group stage. We now have to score 3 away to a team who have conceded 2 goals in their whole Champions League 2014/15 campaign. Shambles. I won't dwell too much on it though. Martin heard the most of my anger last night, so he may or may not share it on his blog haha.
Harry
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