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.
