Count to Three

This year, my soccer coaches decided to put me in a new position-goalie. I've never played this position before and if you had told me years ago when I started playing soccer that I would end up there, I would've quit then and there or told you that you were crazy. Playing goalie isn't for the timid-it requires aggressiveness, strength, stamina, and flexibility. The most important lesson I've learned from playing goalie is something Coach M. taught me-to count to three.

He was trying to teach me to punt, a skill needed by every goalie. After saving (catching) the ball, the goalie has six seconds to get rid of it again. However, they can't go past the eighteen yard line. Thus, in order to get it up to the midfield or offense, the goalie needs to kick it far up the field. Putting it on the ground for a kick, however, will only get it picked up by the other team's offense (plus the ref will tweet at you if you do). So the goalie has to drop the ball and kick it before it hits the ground. This is what is called a punt. One thing Coach M. realized when he was watching me was that I tended to try and rush my punt. And so he told me this-slow down and count to three before every kick. And it hasn't failed me yet.

Aside from the crash course in a basic goalie skill, I've found that this can also be applied to life (and luckily it wasn't a lesson that I had to learn the hard way). If you're like me, you tend to rush things to try and hurry up and get them done. And when you do, you miss certain steps, usually the boring, mundane ones that provide the framework for the whole entire thing. We get into such a rush to get things done that we don't realize that we're building our house without the foundation and we get disappointed when the whole things falls flat over with a little bit of hard wind and rain.

In America, we live in a culture that centered around "fast"-fast food, e-mail, microwaves, ect. We get frustrated when things take longer than we think they should. We get frustrated when we have to wait more than a few minutes for our Big Mac. So the point I'm driving at here is, maybe we need to take Coach M.'s advice and take a few seconds and count to three. In a literal sense, that could mean in the middle of a heated argument, taking a deep breath, counting to three to get our heads back, and then solving things the right way. In a broader sense, such as taking on a big project, that could mean laying out three (or more) things that we need to build the basic framework. Those things could be partners (alway recommended), financial support, and materials.

And I guarantee that if you take Coach M.'s advice, things will turn out a lot better for you. It hasn't failed me yet and my punts (when I apply the advice) always make it more than twenty yards.

So take a minute. 1...2...3...

~Miri