'Tired' coach

I grabbed the tire and carried it onto the field and thought, well, at least this might make things interesting for a little while.

Coaching girls recreational soccer can be a lot of things - fun, frustrating, uplifting, maddening, joyful, gut-wrenching and yes, even boring.

This year's team is better than most, however. At least the girls want to play, which might sound like a strange statement, but a lot of kids get signed up for sports that they want absolutely nothing to do with. They don't want to play. They don't want to run. They don't want to be here at all.

Their parents just signed them up, dropped them off. Hi Mr. Peterson, keep an eye out for me for an hour or so, wouldjya?

Thankfully, this is not a team of girls like that.

But they still get bored. Which is to say soccer can easily become the most boring sport on Earth if you let it. I mean, look at what you're supposed to do. You kick the ball or you chase after the ball or you chase after someone with the ball. Somewhere there's supposed to be fun in there.

On good days, finding the fun is easy. On bad days the boredom factor seeps in quickly and it turns to torture in a hurry.

The tire was an attempt to get away from the boredom factor. Practice, though it's a necessary evil, can be the most boring thing on Earth, not only for the players, but for the coaches as well.

Drills, by their very nature are boring. And concepts, though they might look good on paper or one of those fancy dry-erase boards, are also the sort of thing that make a 13-year-old girl's eyes gloss over.

Trust me.

So I lugged this tire (if anyone is missing a tire, it's a 14-incher with studs. The studs still seemed pretty good, for what it's worth) out to the goal and then conned a kid named Cody who was just hanging out into holding it up.

The game was pretty simple. The girls paired up, with each pair against every other pair. The object was to kick the ball through the tire. That was five points. If you just hit the tire, that was one point. There were no points for hitting Cody. Though someone took his hat off a couple of times.

The game started out quickly enough with a lot of concepts getting worked in, without a type A guy like me having to tell it to them. You know, the kind of stuff coaches preach all the time - spread the field, pass the ball, talk to each other, be aggressive, blah, blah, blah.

They did it all on their own.

And they were laughing.

Before we knew it, time was up. It was getting dark and practice was over.

You can let go of that tire now Cody. Thanks for your help. I'd been outshined by an old tire.

Boy, did it feel good.

Photographer friend Ed Gilliland has a new gallery in Kalispell. It's called the 344 Gallery, as in the address on Main Street. Ed is one of the best working photographers in the Park today. Despite losing an arm and a leg to an injury years back, he still manages some great photos. Ed has what a lot of people don't - patience - and that's the real secret to taking good photos in Glacier. The gallery also features photos from Marion Lacy as well. I recommend you check it out.

Chris Peterson is the editor and a columnist for the Hungry Horse News.