I've started calling football "soccer". I know.

Yesterday, I swallowed my pride and re-joined the school’s soccer club. When I first arrived, I would go to soccer practice once a week. My intentions were to get some exercise, score brownie points and bond with the older male students who would rather do pretty much anything other than speak to me. 

It was okay at first. I can be pretty flexible on the one hand, but also slightly lazy on the other. I enjoyed hanging out with the students outside lessons. It was an opportunity to spend time with a teacher at the school who had made an initial effort to be open and friendly towards me, even though he spoke almost no English.

But I dropped out. Here’s why-and it’s a cautionary tale for JETs and other ALTs who try to get involved in extra curricular activities. I should precede this tale by adding that I blame only myself for my failure to stick with the soccer-I’m not trying to shift blame elsewhere. But there are also a range of challenges which, bit by bit, wear down one’s initial enthusiasm. So here goes. 

It started reasonably well. The students made an effort. The students with whom I was working were also students I taught and were pretty much the least enthusiastic English students you could ever find. That was okay. But they didn’t want to stand around chatting in English. Again, that was okay-I felt it was enough just to be there, spending normal time with them. I didn’t feel like I needed to make every session an English class. 

The first thing that annoyed me was the format of the sessions. Every week, all they did was drills. They would never play a match, except on weekends. So every day of the week would start with hugely elaborate warm up exercises. These would last about 20 minutes. They would then spend about 15 minutes practicing keepy uppy type exercises-header, volley, catch etc. This would sometimes be hard to join in if there were even numbers so I would sometimes take a supervisory role rather than an involved one. 

The next 30 minutes would usually involve drilling some kind of move. For example, 3 players would be in a line and would have to pass the ball 3 times in a very specific way, before shooting. This was pretty dull, but I could see there was some benefit. One thing which always amused me was that the goalkeeper would almost always let me score. It’s a bit like letting your boss beat you at squash. I’ve seen this kind of thing before-it’s part of the cultural custom of bigging people up. Anyway, it’s strange to play a sport where you know that people are helping you to look good as far as is possible. 

But there was never a match. Or anything properly competitive. The drill would maybe be followed by twenty minutes practicing pull ups before a long warm down and raking of the pitch. I remember reading somewhere that English footballers dislike training in some European mainland countries because of the strong emphasis on technical improvement and lack of actual playing time. This has been used as a criticism of the English training methods and is one of the possible explanations for the lack of technically gifted youngsters in the UK. 

But it’s a bit dull. Especially if you’re no good at the technical stuff.  A few other things happened. After the initial novelty of my presence wore off, I didn’t feel like the students were getting much out of me being there. We weren’t using much English and we weren’t bonding especially, though they were a good bunch. In addition, I had a couple of misunderstandings with the team coach which made things a little awkward between us. These were entirely caused by the language difference. Then the schedules changed and sessions began to be intermittently cancelled. I would bring my kit in and find that there was no training that day. No one would warn me. Thankfully I never got changed until I knew for sure. This was really irritating though. Finally, the weather turned and sessions became primarily about fitness and cross country runs because the pitch had frozen. There’s no way I could have embarrassed myself in front of them by attempting a long distance run, so that froze me out slightly. In the end, I missed a few sessions, resolved to be more reliable but then eventually dropped out.

A couple of months passed. A new wave of students joined the school. Then, a few days ago, the soccer coach asked me out of the blue if I wanted to come to soccer this week. I saw this mainly as a goodwill gesture on his part. He had gone out of his way to try and make me feel welcome again. I was very grateful for this and said yes immediately. So yesterday, I again joined the team and I’m going to try and be committed until I leave Japan in August. 

That August deadline is looming. Less than seven days after leaving Japan I will be back in the job I was doing just over a year ago. It’s gonna be tricky.