Why should the beautiful game be a man’s sport? Us soccer girls wear our mud splatters and smelly sweat-soaked bibs as badges of pride for everything else cleaner that our CCA offers. That’s not to say you can’t join us if you don’t enjoy playing in the rain though, because bathrooms – with hot water, no less!! – are at the ready after training in EWBIS, and flocking to them/our shower sessions are only another kind of post-training bonding activity.
Besides lunching, celebrating birthdays, BBQs and camps together, as Mr. Leong, our coach, always says, “PT is the best way to bond.” Our training includes Physical Training on Mondays, split up according to different goals over the
months: endurance, strength and agility. While running ten rounds around the track or doing a circuit of twenty-one stations may sound daunting at first, accomplishing such feats for and with your team can greatly boost morale! Improving your fitness over the year and realizing so will help both your team and yourself – one of the payoffs of being recognized as one of the more “hardcore” sports CCAs for girls.
Apart from that, we have two training sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays where we are taught drills to improve our ball skills. Mr. Leong is very honest with us in saying that girls usually need more work, because very rarely have we played before we join the CCA. So don’t worry if you have never touched a soccer ball in your life – many of us started the same way too! What we’re looking for is the right attitude and passion to work hard (though basic coordination skills and some ball sense would be appreciated too). Just come down and try dribbling the ball because otherwise you’ll never know if you have hidden talent waiting to be discovered!
Beyond that, the team is really a joy to have as a family in the stressful years of JC. In fact, you literally hear us before you see us – because of the amount and volume of laughing we emanate. Messing up during trainings is always good reason to laugh, and creating hilarious memories always brings people together. So does dying together weekly during PT, and nobody complains because of how there’s always someone to cheer you on while you’re hanging from the IPU bar next to the canoeists. Having someone to run for on the pitch helps you understand Mr. Leong’s aphorism, “Lose never mind, but must win!” (He says many funny things by the way, starting from calling you ‘aunties’ to counting “2, 4, 6, 8, 7”.) Sounds contradictory at first, but what he means is that striving to win does not mean awarding the result the same importance as the process we go through together. He always goes through videos of our games with us after so that we learn, and always tells us if a game is good or bad depending on our teamwork and positioning rather than the goals we concede.
For more quotes from our beloved coach and other information, you can always visit the soccer board (one of the few remaining ones in school) in EWBIS, or join us and hear Mr. Leong’s stories of our stores and board yourself! Whatever it is, you get a kick out of soccer!!! >:)
