Failure and Success
I have have experienced lots of sporting failures over the years but luckily I have always seemed to be able build off them. It has been a wonderful learning and bonding experience for both me, my son and lots of this team his mates.
I have written and posted a couple of weeks ago about a fantastic weekend experience we had years ago winning a junior Australian Football League Premiership.
https://ecency.com/hive-168869/@new.things/the-week-of-my-life?referral=new.things
There is another time that springs to mind when choosing this weeks topic.
Australia is a bit of a sporting mad country and is such a multicultural place that children have many different sports available for them to play.
My son was invited to play in a local mixed Touch Football team through a neighbour who was short of players. He caught on really fast and was pretty good even though he was years younger than everyone else.
So apart from our yearly commitment to the AFL we also played Touch Football, which is sort of like Rugby but without the tackling and has less players on a smaller ground.
We only did a few games before the team coach wanted me to take over the coaching duties as I had started playing in a senior team as well. Our juniors were more of a social team but we were losing too many games and the children were not that happy.
We battled away year after year, two seasons per year between the AFL seasons but no success, failure after failure. One season we lost a semi final to a team playing up an age group. The younger team was well drilled and our boys just thought they would win easy. They were throwing the ball around wildly, much to my dislike. My team was so pissed off when they lost the game.
The next season my son was not keen to play until I mentioned I had been working the phone, head hunting a few more faster and skillful under 14 boys. I was trying to keep things quiet but when word got around everyone wanted to join the team.
Even though the boys were fast and skillful, most had not played this touch football code before and did not know the rules.
The boys learned fast and we got into the finals pretty easy. The final was touch and go, it was right down to the wire. But finally after years of trying and a load of persistence and failure, we finally found sweet success.
