This blog project, which has been running now since 2012 or 2013 (I can’t actually remember) gives me the opportunity to continuously report.
This is a concept that I’ve come to appreciate more recently in starting to work with Bill Seddon, who is our expert Endodontist at the practice, who posts on a closed discussion forum group, which is worldwide, consecutive Endodontic cases.
Just think about that for a minute and the importance of posting consecutively and continuously.
When you post to a group who hold you to account, everything you do in sequence means they see the good, the bad and the ugly.
It means that people appreciate that things go wrong and things go right and you’re constantly trying to make more things go right than go wrong.
This is completely at odds with what we often see on social media platforms which is the posting of the good at the expense of the posting of the bad which is the thing that actually allows us to get better.
With regards to life in general, I hope and have tried to post honestly in these writings over the past nearly 3,000 posts and so, today I’m going to fill you in on the boys football.
The team that I coach, which is now under 13’s and the boys are either almost 13 or are 13 and some of them are nearly 6ft tall with big, deep voices (including my own son Callum) is the WBC Mustangs.
I’ve had these boys together since they were six or seven years old and we have seen some wonderful times and some brilliant results and memories.
We probably peaked a few years ago winning the cup but the stories around the team and the development of the players as footballers but more as individuals has been amazing but it’s not all a bed of roses and it’s certainly not all plain sailing.
A few years ago our superstar, Iesa, came to play on invitation from Callum as they’re best friends and Iesa has moved on and up to play divisions higher and also now to be scouted by Nottingham Forest and may have an opportunity to go there to the next level of football.
In losing Iesa, we lose one of our linchpins, one of our key members of the team and through natural wastage we’ve also lost two other players.
That puts us in a position where we cannot hold ourselves in the league that we were previously in and in fact division 2 and competing to move to division 1.
In division 2 now we’re getting wasted every week.
Last Sundays result was an 8-1 defeat and the Sunday before was 8-0 and the Sunday before that was 6-1 and this poses some extraordinary challenges in trying to keep the team together and keep the boys motivated and interested in football.
Before the start of this season we had asked to be electively relegated just to be more competitive but there was no space and it couldn’t work out so, we have three more games to play, getting hit with a plank in the face for at least 2 of those.
The one ray of shining light forwards is one game where we should be competitive against the team which is a week on Sunday and so, we‘ve had to reframe our narrative as a group and focus on that like a ‘cup final’, using the games where we get battered as training sessions; to improve some of the aspects of our game so that we’ll get better for the big event.
Our training sessions are psychological counselling and coaching sessions, trying to keep the boys on track who are becoming more and more fed up and more likely to fall out between them.
I post this in terms of continuous monitoring because it was very easy for me to write about the Mustangs and how proud I was of them when Josh (our super captain) had lost his brother through cancer but had used football to bring himself through, had led a team to win the cup final and been promoted from division 8 all the way to division 2.
Harder to write about it when you’re on the downward and thinking of finding ways to stop the boat leaking.
The most important thing though is that this is life and the lessons these boys will learn through football are probably sharper and more worthwhile in this stage than they were on the way up.
It’s never been about the football for me, I’m not about football but it’s been about the development of this team, as a bunch of lads who work together through the good times and the bad times and help each other out.
You have to learn how to do that and in a hurry how to do it now and we all have to learn how to do that.
Blog Post Number - 2709
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