Early Soccer Mornings

There was a stretch of a few weeks where my 5 year old son C would wake me up really early in the morning. Some parents would be fine waking up around 7am to take their kids outside. I was not one of those parents.

I am generally not a morning person. It’s tough for me to wake up since some nights run really late for a variety of reasons - working out, work, or the kids not sleeping well and stirring (and they already have a late bedtime compared to other kids). C has been really loving soccer, so I didn’t want to say no that first morning. I dragged myself out of bed and we went out to the fields at the park.

We would start the session with some fun drills. It’s just waking our bodies up while practicing dribbling or shooting. I didn’t grow up playing soccer, so this is all new to me. I only absorb what I can standing on the sidelines during his games or sessions. I feel like C is already more skillful than I am and he is only 5! After the drills, he wanted to scrimmage and we did! He beat me the first day and to cap off the session, we sprinted to the baseball field backstop and back to where the soccer goals were to get our cardio better. C had so much fun, he was waking me up early again the next day to do it all over again.

This became our end of the school year mornings where we would play soccer, get all sweaty, and enjoy some morning light together. It stretched into the summer and I really looked forward to it in the mornings, so much so that I started to go to bed as early as I reasonably could and I even bought some cleats so I wouldn’t slip around the field so much. I also started to plan the drill sessions so we would do new things every day that would actually be helpful in games. It got to a point where on day during the summer, C asked to go out in the afternoons so we could do the same thing. As the morning sessions got to be regular, it was easier and easier to wake up for them.

While the summer stretched on, unfortunately our morning sessions stopped. I think C is going through a growth spurt and just needed more rest in general. Then my work go much busier in the mornings and he has also been obsessed with reading these last few weeks. He would wake up excited to read and that’s not a bad thing either. Hopefully at some point we will restart our early soccer mornings again because I loved getting some exercise while spending quality time with C. It doesn’t hurt to further break in my cleats also so I can make them more comfortable!