They're with me.

I have groupies! Nothing along the lines of Heather or Ree. No where even near Winona's crowd. Emi leaves me in the dust. But it is only because my groupies don't know how to type, do not have computer access during the day, and have to go to bed by 9:00.

That's right.

I am the shiz among the 8-10 year old soccer playing nerd boys in our suburb! I have been helping coach Big C's soccer team. And a few times during the season the league has these mass practices (not where they pretend to be priests with Holy Wheat Thins, the kind where there are 48 small boys on one field) and I help there as well. I don't run anything. I don't plan the drills. But I have sort of made "colorful examples" and "thorough explanations" my niche.

And it turns out that the way the male soccer coaches in our league explain things only hits home for boys with a certain learning style. But then there is that subset of players that try to think through everything and want to know why. You know the ones. The ones who tell the team that the trajectory of the ball in the air is a parabola. The same ones who try to explain to the goalie how to utilize sin, cosine, and tangent to best cut off the shot.

This group of boys not only likes to hear how they should approach a goal kick like an upside-down catapult, they kick the ball better when they do. Once they understood vectors and inertia and kinetic energy they really gave those jocks a run for their money. It does help at this age that my little guys know their right from their left and if you tell them the job of the right defender happens in a certain zone they actually stay there, by golly!

If I am explaining anything to another boy there is a good chance that one of my mighty mathematicians will run over and listen. At the start of practice tonight I had (not counting my kid and my adorable neighbor boy) three other kids just standing and looking up at me (they're short, remember) waiting to be told to do something. One of the player's grandmother told me that her grandson didn't want to go to practice until they pulled up in the car and saw I was there.

And after practice, Big C likes to keep playing after everyone goes home. He really prefers if just the two of us practice shots or he goes in goal. But we haven't really had that chance because my groupies want to stay and play too. I love my (loosely defined part time volunteer) job!