Live to Love, Love to Live

Waking up in the morning was pretty hard. Yesterday was pretty exhausting and well when you walk outside and it is 28 degrees it is not fun either. I mean, come one, we came to New Orleans for a Filleo Project. We were not planning to come here for a nice beautiful trip, we came to help the kids. But, in the back of our minds we did think, "Sweet! We get to spend a few days in New Orleans in warmer weather." Well, "Earth to Jed!" it is not warm out here- it is freezing!

I was glad though that the day started with a laugh. Jared Emily Montz who were our drivers and host family were having trouble with the defroster. When they tried to turn the dial to defrost the dial broke and they could not defrost the front windshield. So, we are sitting there watching Jared and Emily use their hands and rags to wipe the windshield down so he could see while he was driving. They are not used to cold weather at all. We fixed it with pliers the next day though, atta boy RadioU Jared.

We pull up to our event at an inner city school and see a sweet soccer field that has the new turf on it. Also, there are about 30 kids playing on it. I immediately thought I was in the movie "The Big Green." The things these kids said only added to my perspective, oh what a laugh, but I will get to that later.

The night before our big event Jared Montz had us all sit down and we planned out the event to a "T." It took a couple of hours, but we thank him for wanting this event to go as smooth as possible, which it did.
We set up the table and all the kids start to bring over their registration forms we sent out to them. We thank God so much because come six days before the event we had 0 kids registered, yes ZERO. But the day of our event we had around 30 kids show up. For an event planned with few staff and little time it was a HUGE success. We brought them all in and separated them into groups. We had stations for the kids to go to every 12 minutes. Then at the end we would play a big scrimmage.

My station was sharks and minnows. It's my favorite because I love the "log roll." Yes, it is a sweet technique in this game. All the kids get on a line and they have to dribble across to a line that is about 20 yards away. The curve ball is that you have to get past the shark-- ME. I had to kick their ball away and I did that with the "log roll." I would get on the ground and stretch my hands and legs as far as I could go and roll at the kids. There was only one kid who beat this dangerous roll and he flicked it over me and ran. Touché my friend! Touché!

We also had a shooting station with a radar gun that showed the mph that the kids kicked the ball. This was a huge hit, thanks Emily. Jared Montz did a fun passing game that he made into soccer bowling; I never had seen it before but will use it now, thanks Jared. Then a volunteer named Grant helped with World Cup. That is a game where each child gets a partner and those teams pick a country they will be named after. They then try to score against the other teams on one goal, let's just say "CHAOS" but still very fun chaos.

We then ended with a scrimmage that was pretty crazy because the field was 40X25 and we played 11 on 11. Well, I kinda cheated and threw on a couple extra kids and played 13 on 11, that may be the reason why my team won 2-0, sorry Jared...

Here are some pictures from our clinic, I will have a video of the clinic posted in the next couple of days and part 2 of our day Saturday to follow after that. Thanks for spending time with me.