For my community service, I spent more than two hours with younger children, teaching them some of the basic skills of soccer. I am a soccer player as most people already know, I always look forward for a season where I will be able to do what I love and play soccer. Since soccer is a sport that starts in late august and runs throughout the summer and most of fall, we have plenty of time to do things besides practice and play in games. There is a program that we have that allows kids to come out and play soccer, learn a few things and just enjoy life.


The children who come to the soccer camp are all interested and willing to learn. I have found it is much easier to teach someone something when they are interested than when they do not care. My job was to teach them control with the ball so they make clean passes and when they dribble they don’t lose it and turn it over to the other team. The other boys from the soccer team were teaching the children goal keeping and scoring. At each station there was a competition at the end before they rotated to another station. At the ball control station they would see how many toe touches they could do within a minute and the person who won got an award certificate. At the goal keeping station they were competing to who could punt the ball the furthest and who can save the most goals within 10 kicks. For scoring the competition was to see who could score the most goals. The winner of each competition received an award at the end of the program. After all of the skills stations were complete, we wanted to let the children put their new skills to use and had a scrimmage. We let them play in the scrimmage but would stop the action to point out different things about the skills they had learned or improved that day. By the end of the program we saw a lot of improvement in their basic soccer skills and they all had a really good time. While we waited for their parents to arrive we set up cones in the net and had a small session on aiming the ball when shooting a goal. Each cone had a certain point value and the child who scored the most points at the end got a candy bar. I learned a lot from doing this program and it really made me feel like soccer was more than just part of my life, it was part of these younger kids’ lives as well. We helped them improve on something they love to do and hopefully it will help them enjoy the sport more.


I don’t usually like to do things for community service because I didn’t see why helping other people would do much for me but I really enjoyed this and I learned a lot about how helping others can help you realize things about yourself. I also saw how the very beginnings of teamwork are created. You don’t notice it as much when you are learning to work as a team and now that I’ve been playing soccer for so long I don’t even realize I am consciously doing it. It was really good to see these kids coming together and improving themselves as a team and working to all reach the same goals.