Yesterday I thought of the Natick Stiffs as I went to my first French Soccer practice. I had just come from my French lessons with our teacher Blandine, so all the other kids were sitting on the field in a big clump already. I handed my mom my water bottle and fleece and jogged out to the clump of people waiting to kick my butt. I arrived at the clump and found out that it was not in fact a clump but 5 lines of children with 2 coaches at the front facing all of them. I randomly joined the 2nd to last line and put on a stony face while the coach slowly announced things in French. When it was over the kids all got up and started moving in different directions. I went up to the first coach and asked if he spoke English. He quickly dismissed me by saying, “No”, and looking back down at some papers before walking away to talk to another man. A little annoyed and a lot confused, I went over to the second coach who had wandered 10 feet away. I knew him from the day when Katherine and I played with the 8-10 year olds when we turned up on the wrong day. “What are we doing?” I asked. He replied, “Run”, and made little ovals with his finger before pointing to a group of kids. We were doing laps. As I ran off I whispered, “That, I can do.” And do that I did! I would like to say thank you to my coach John Adelmann for having us run so many laps, and Dermot Adelmann for forcing me not to stop jogging when I ran the mile. Thanks to them I was able to easily stay in front of every single French kid. I was careful not to pass the first French kid though, for two reasons. One, I had no idea how many laps to do and where to go when we were done, and two; I didn’t want to be a show off. After the laps we did some passing drills. He had us get in groups of 3 and pass in a small triangle. Of course nobody ran over and asked to be with me, so I waited until the coach paired me with a group of 2. We passed around and I was just as good as they were and was able to use the outside of my foot. One of the kids continued to pass the ball much harder than needed so when I got the ball I made a “other-way”, gesture with my finger, and passed the ball, quite hard, to him. I would have been fine with having it bounce off of his shin guard and roll away, but he missed it by 5 inches and it rolled all the way to the running track. After that he passed much softer and we went through the rest of the drills pretty easily and well. Eventually the coach had us practice throw-ins and trapping throw-ins, and well… I was great at throw-ins and I could throw it to specific places, (Head, chest, knees, etc.). Then it was my turn to trap the ball. With my luck the coach decided to do my throw-ins himself. He got in quite a few “Aye! Aye! Aye’s” and did a lot of head shaking that drill. I did much better for the rest of the drills, and then it was time for a scrimmage. We played with tiny 3 foot goals until the coach got bored at the 0-0 score and made the goals regular size. I was my usual “stop the ball at the cost of bodily injury self”, and I bloodied one knee kicked a few kids by accident and earlier I had blocked a ball with my face, which resulted in my glasses being bent and the left lens popping out, but I played on. My team won the scrimmage 4-1. After the scrimmage we put back the soccer balls and pinnies before sitting down in the middle of the concrete-with-a-tiny-bit-of-turf-and-sand-and-tiny-rocks-over-it field. I went over and sat with two people I had made sort-of friends with during the practice, both of whom spoke English. We talked until the coach came over and pointed at my Torres soccer shirt while saying something in French. He laughed, and I turned to Alexander for a translation. “He says that shirt is too good for you, but don’t worry he says jokes like that all the time. One time I wore a USA shirt on the day USA played Ghana and he booed me.” Then a third kid talked to me a bit before the coach came back over. He smiled and asked me where I was from in the USA. I said Natick Massachusetts, which made him point to his socks and say “Massachusetts!” Apparently “sock” in French is Chaussette. Then he started listing off cities along with some other kids. The list included, “New Orleans, Las Vegas, California, and the California girls.” I think I’ll enjoy the next practice except for one thing. They only give us one water break and the practice is 2 hours! Bring it.