Some of the major donations we received for this trip were soccer equipment from various places. So now would be a good time to thank the Los Angeles Police Department, my cousins, the doctor that gave me my vaccinations before the trip and the Lehigh University Men’s Soccer Team.

There were two training sessions a day. The kids have never had so many balls before so they were very excited. We tried to restrict the kids playing to about 2 kids per one ball so that everyone has something to do and not just stand around. We also tried to limit the number of kids to 20 per session, but that was difficult. The kids were all very skilled, but had never done a drill before. We tried to teach them to use all the surfaces of their feet, how to pass and a little bit of how to defend. Most of the drills were given to us by the coaches at Lehigh.

At the end of the week we brought out the uniforms and pinnys and had a student vs teacher soccer game. One of the volunteers played for the students during the first half and coached the kids, and one of the other volunteers was the referee. The teachers won 4-1 and it was interesting because they definitely didn’t give the kids any slack. The substitute kids in the second half were quite smaller than the ones in the first half, so the teachers has a distinct size advantage.

We are trying to get the teachers to continue the coaching the students by creating an after school program. The drills will be documented and the school found a good website for coaching kids. Hopefully they will run similar training sessions and the kids can continue to play their favorite sport. There is a gallery of soccer pictures and a quick video of the match.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 4:46 am and is filed under school, soccer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.