Celebrating Life: Our Football Experience

Some of my friends have been asking about our experience with football this year and I realized that I'd hardly even blogged about it. Where have I been?? This has all been so new for everyone involved and we didn't even know anyone who had taken this route before.

So here's what happened.

The boys were minding their own business this summer playing soccer together in the front yard like usual.

They had no idea they were being watched.

But apparently the kid next door took notice of Christian's kicking skills and the wheels started turning in his head. Our neighbor, Chance, is a senior this year at Charleston High where football is quite the big deal. For the whole town. And Chance is a super star. (He's also Christian's holder and #11 in all pics)

Next thing we know, there is a knock at the door from a guy introducing himself as the high school football coach asking if there would be a chance that Christian would consider kicking for them this year. Under the Tebow law, homeschoolers are allowed to participate in public school sports. Interestingly, he'd never seen him kick.

Well. This is certainly something we'd never thought of.

But Christian was interested and it sounded like fun. Besides, we figured we weren't married to it so if it turned out to be anything other than great, we could step out.

We bought a football. Or actually Grandpa did.

And Christian put his little brothers to work chasing down imaginary field goals while the neighbors watched and hoped this was their chance to turn around a poor kicking game.

A couple weeks later Oakland Raider's kicker, Eddie Carmona, came by to take a look and work with him on his kicks. Eddie is a former Charleston Tiger. He came over a couple of different times and we all thoroughly enjoyed him and appreciated his willingness to work with our boy.

Summer practice started and Christian got a chance to meet the team and work muscles he'd probably never even used before.

Meanwhile, I was learning what all was going to be involved and asking some homeschool mom-ish questions. Like ..... does he have to have a shot record? do I have to turn in grades? are there attendance requirements? ...stuff like that.

I called the superintendent and he was full of answers. In fact, he was very eager for Christian to come on board. He offered the use of the library, any resources that I may be interested in, AP classes, college classes, and everything that would be available to any other student. In fact, he said that Christian could come and go as he pleased using it like a college campus. If he wanted to enroll in any class and didn't like it, he could just drop it without it being recorded on a transcript. He said he wanted to be a help in any way he could and they were working to re-write the school's by-laws. (This was a first for them too.)

The things that were required

1. a physical

2. a current standardized test score

3. enrollment in 7th period athletics

That was it.

At this point I was starting to see just what a big deal football really was around here. Several times I would need to make a phone call or run an errand and someone would say...."Oh, you're the new kicker's mom!"

Hilarious! Like he was famous or something.

A couple weeks later we were texting back and forth with the coach about Josh playing on the 7th grade team. Now I was more apprehensive about this one since he's so young and not quite as "fully baked" as his brother. Lots of thoughts like.... influence of the other boys, whether he knew the game well enough, the responsibility of it all, and if he was just ready for such a thing at this point in his life.

We've had some iffy moments but so far so good. We set some rules with him and he's doing great.

We are about 3 weeks into the season and this is every bit as much fun as soccer ever was. This town and school has been so welcoming and more than accommodating in every way. The principal even gave all our kids free passes to every home game to save us some money every week.

Friday nights are a blast! The lights. The announcer. The band. The excitement. The stands are full and at the away game our visitor side has more fans than the home team. And at every game so far, someone has come and introduced themselves to me.

And now for some pics....