Twist, tumble and kick

The first time Audrea played a team sport she was in kindergarten and my employers sponsored a soccer team. That's about all I remember. Oh and the jersey's were sky blue. Audrea has 5 uncles on her dad's side and they all played soccer through-out school. I believe a couple were still in school when she played on her first team so they couldn't always come out and watch her or work with her. So she played what I now know is referred to as "bunch ball." All of the 5 and 6 year olds run in a mob after the ball and stick their feet out in hopes of kicking it once in a while. If anyone scores a goal during this sixty minutes of field jogging, parents on both sides cheer like crazy. No positions are held, trying to teach them at this point is a waste of time and effort. There is no goalie in the off chance someone should actually come close enough to score a goal we wouldn't want to crush their delicate self-esteem by blocking their attempts. (Plus the goalies tend to lose interest quickly and hence increase the chance of serious injury should the ball make it to their end of the field.) Again...the season was pretty forgettable.
Soon after, Audrea and I moved to the Bay Area...Aaahhh...Big City = Many Choices! I was so excited at the thought of all of the choices my daughter and I would have not just with sports, but with schools, restaurants, shopping, weekend events, etc. What I didn't take into account is the cost of all of these lovely opportunities, but more on that later.
Audrea decided she wanted to try gymnastics. Great! A sport I know nothing about! So I did some research and found a gym that offered a Saturday morning class in an old historic theater not too far from our subletted home. It was spacious and beautiful and cool that we were taking classes in such a historic building. We figured we were about to make some history ourselves after all! We woke up that first day so excited to go to class. We arrived early and watched the earlier class come to an end. We patiently explained the pronounciation of her name. (If I only had a dollar for everytime a coach called her Audrey or Andrea!) And I sat with all of those other early morning moms and dads and watched with baited breath as she tumbled her first somersault and tried unsuccessfully to turn her first cartwheel. That lasted about a month. Audrea wasn't much for getting up and out the door by 9 am on a Saturday. (She still isn't.) And since I was commuting to work in true Bay Area fashion, there was no way we could do a week night class. The hopes of Olympic stardom a la Mary Lou Retten were quickly forgotten.
The next fall, we decided to try soccer again. This time she brought home a flyer from school announcing sign ups for the Jack London Youth Soccer League. The league ran through out the East Bay and from what I could gather there were small branches of the league in most of East Bay communities, including ours. So we called for sign up and pricing information....After she splashed cold water on my face, I came to and explained the reason I had passed out. The cost was $75.00 a player and that didn't include the uniform or the manditory chocolate bar fund-raiser! Wow. Where was I going to find that kind of money? Single mom, living in the Bay, subletting a couple of rooms, commuting across the bridge every day, as it was we were eating Mac & Cheese and Fish Sticks far too often. Where was I going to find an extra $75?
Thank Goodness for birthdays! Audrea recieved about $50 that year in cold hard cash so I decided to ensure her commitment level was there, I had her contribute $40 to the cause.
It worked. The year was 2001 and despite her dad coaching her, I still don't remember much about her actual play on the field. What I do remember and what will always stay engrained in my head was that game we played on the morning of Saturday, September 15th. Our playing field was about one mile north of the Oakland International Airport. We had cancelled that Tuesday's practice after the kids had been sent home from school early. Even though we figured these 1st and 2nd graders were too young to really understand the impact of what had happened, we adults were all well aware of the close proximity of three international airports and thus high risk area we lived and played in.
Needless to say, when the first north-bound commercial plane flew over our little soccer field with our little 6 and 7 year olds, the players, coaches, referrees and parents and I swear even the ball froze, looked up and watched it fly out holding our collective breath. It was like one of those scenes from a movie where it all moves in slow motion and all we heard was the noise of the planes engines flying overhead. And just like that, it was gone and life on the soccer field returned and the season went on despite the horrors of what had happened on the East Coast just a few days earlier. It was as if by playing that game, we were showing the terrorists that they couldn't stop us. We all won that day.