Yesterday, I experienced a paradigm shift. Over the last 12 months, I’d been watching and thinking about a kid out in Beaverton who loves to act out in our class. It seems, however, that the exact opposite had been happening.

Since our start together, this particular child been acting out in class – using his hands on other kids and generally disrupting the class several times each week. We’d spoken with the teachers to ensure our strategies aligned with theirs. We learned his general background to enable us to have insight and compassion into his behavior. We heard from the child and his parents about how much fun he has with us. We were not letting this one go.

The challenge was that most anything that is established as a behavior is just that – established behavior. So, getting a change – getting a new behavior or an absence of that behavior – entails having purposeful, meaningful interactions to help a child learn new ways to express the sentiment behind the behavior more compassionately or appropriately. To be sure, this boy is sweet, protective, helpful, independent, silly, athletic and intelligent. He’s a bright, fun kid with an oversized heart. However, as I sat down to talk with the director of his school yesterday, the child’s acting out was still on my mind. We’d seen improvement, but not what I’d expected – not over this long a period of time. Was it time to re-strategize?

“Oh no,” she said. “You don’t know what he was doing outside your class.”

She went on to describe a set of behaviors another full notch beyond what we’d seen at Soccer Shots. Her words were a block of wood hitting my head, rattling around facts and lines of thought I’d drawn.

In the wider context of his behavior elsewhere, he wasn’t acting out much at all with us. My head rocked for a minute as a huge paradigm shift occurred: Instead of thinking of him as acting out in our class, I began to see how with us, he may have found a place to act in.

Soccer Shots Los Angeles has been expanding at a steady pace over the past few months! And it seems that we have been introducing a new coach almost every week. We have been fortunate both with our growth and with the coaches that we have recently added to our team, and now we are excited to welcome Gabrielle Woodson to the SSLA team! Gabrielle will be coaching at schools and parks in and around Los Angeles, including the Westside, Hollywood, and Culver City.

Gabrielle loves soccer, kids, and coaching! She grew up in a military household that encouraged academic and athletic excellence. Once she started playing soccer at the age of 8, she never looked back. She played high school soccer, club soccer, and achieved All-American honors at Williams College.

While playing competitive soccer, Gabrielle shared her passion for the game with young kids by running youth sports camps, volunteering in elementary and high schools, as well as instructing sports nutrition classes in South Africa. Prior to relocating to Los Angeles, Gabrielle also coached a U14 girl’s club team in Alexandria, Virginia. Soccer was instrumental in Gabrielle’s upbringing, and she strives to share her love and passion for the game with children through Soccer Shots.

Danny was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley and has been playing soccer since the age of 5. AYSO is were it all started, ever since the first day he first stepped onto the soccer field, it was love at first sight.

He has played in various soccer clubs including for his high school. Soccer has been a great influence on his life and has taught him great life skills, including commitment, teamwork, and responsibility that he uses to this day.

Danny is currently a junior CSUN, majoring in criminology.

“Soccer has helped me so much throughout my life, I am always willing to give back to the community, especially to our youth. And what better way then through the sport of soccer.”

Danny is excited to share his passion for soccer and to be a part of Soccer Shots.

Soccer Shots SoCal (LA, OC, SD) representing at the Galaxy v Timbers game on Saturday night!

Thank you to all of our families that joined us, and to the Los Angeles Soccer Academy for organizing the evening. What a great game and final goal by Beckham!!!

Lately, we have been very fortunate to experience an extremely positive response from preschools in the south bay and have been invited into a number of new schools! With this comes the need for new, yet experienced individuals to join our team! We have been searching for a coach for some time but have not been willing to settle on just anyone to coach for us. We are very particular about who we select to join our team. The search has ended and we are excited to introduce Phil Bendik!

Coach Phil is delighted to join the Soccer Shots team.

With over 20 years of youth sports coaching and mentoring, he is excited to share is experience and help mold the young lives of today so that they can become confident future leaders.

His passion for working with youth programs was realized years ago when he began working with the Torrance Recreation Department. He has enjoyed supervising sports programs, summer camps and even teaching pre-school! There’s no doubt that his time spent working with kids helped prepare him for fatherhood as he is a proud Dad to four wonderful children. Ranging in ages from 15 to 5, he spends as much time as possible playing, listening and laughing (the list could go on and on) with his kids.

When not on the field or spending time with his family, Phil enjoys classic movies, reading and witty conversation. In 2001, he caught the triathlon bug and soon after, completed his first Ironman in Coeur d’Alene, ID. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Organizational Leadership from Biola University and is in the process of beginning his master’s degree in Clinical Psychology.

Thankful for the many opportunities and accomplishments that have come his way, Coach Phil is truly inspired by the success of others.

“There is no greater feeling than watching someone else cross that finish line and accomplishing their goals.”

Over the next few weeks we will be holding academy and club wide FALL TEAM tryouts. We will need ALL current players on every club team and every academy program to come out for tryouts. With the merger we expect between 250-300 players trying out for our 10-13 club teams. We plan to have only one team per age bracket and we want as many boys and girls to come out as possible, so please invite your friends out for these tryouts. Please note, we will be playing in a league we played in last Fall and it promises to be an organized, exciting season. We also have a home field now! We will be playing our home games at LACES High School (less than 2 miles from Cheviot).


Those players not quite ready for the Fall club teams will be invited to play in our brand new academy league. This will consist of two days of training and intra-academy games on Sundays. The training is a progressive and innovative mixture of futsal, street, freestyle and coerver technical work and a development system designed to give players the tools needed to eventually join one of our club teams. All the details will be included in the new LASA handbook which will be available at our website tomorrow for all families.


FALL 2012 CLUB TEAM TRYOUT SCHEDULE:


Cheviot Hills Park: 2551 Motor Avenue  Los Angeles, CA 90064
 (Field is located in the back of the park, near the archery range.
)
Please follow this age matrix when choosing your tryout day and time:

http://www.calsouth.com/data/Downloads/Resources/AGE_MATRIX_2012-2013.pdf 


Friday, April 13th

4pm-5pm
U12-U13 boys and girls

5pm-6pm
U14-U15 boys and girls

6pm-7pm
U16-U17 boys and girls


Friday, April 20th

4pm-5pm
U8-U9 boys and girls

5pm-6pm
U10-U11 boys and girls

6pm-7pm
U12-U17 boys and girls (make up tryouts)


Friday, April 27th 

4pm-5pm
U8-U11 boys and girls (make up tryouts)


Note: there will be no clinics on the above tryout days.


Please spread the word. GO LASA!

We have been extremely fortunate to have had Andy’s warm personality, passion for working with kids, and years of soccer experience as part of our team over the past couple of years.

And now we are very pleased to announce that Coach Andy Baena has agreed to join us as our full time Lead Coach, Assistant Director of Coaching, & New Business Development (Leagues/Partnerships/Bilingual Programs).

Originally from Manizales, Colombia, Andres “Andy” Baena has lived in California since the tender age of three. He remembers watching his father play soccer and it was then that his passion for the sport was born.

At the age of five, Andy started what would be his soccer career. By the time he reached high school, he was a part of several nationwide traveling teams. He then continued to play for two years at Los Angeles Mission College which led to being part of the first team in 2003 to be honored by the Western State Conference.

At this point in his life, Andy turned his attention to developing strong soccer players, spending time educating and physically training them.

In early 2012, Coach Andy took on the role of Assistant Director of Coaching as well as the responsibility to further develop partnerships with popular leagues, clubs, and bilingual programs in the local Los Angeles soccer world.

With several years of personal and professional experience in youth soccer development, Andy is looking forward to contributing and acquiring knowledge.

“I believe that positive youth development is extremely important to making the future a better place to live in.”

He also worked at a soccer store with almost 10 years of experience helping players from age two and up making sure they have all the right equipment to maximize their soccer skills.

Great friendships, discipline, and the meaning of hard work on and off the field are all lessons soccer has taught him. He enjoys helping children start their soccer experience in a fun, positive and healthy environment.

Andy now plays soccer for fun and is happy to be a part of the Soccer Shots team.

The first Soccer Shots class I attended, I was completely blown away by the excitement of both the kids and coaches. It was such a great experience to see kids outside enjoying each other and having an amazing time kicking the ball around. When children are young, joining a soccer program might just seem like something fun to get them outside. Which is definitely true, but it is so much more.

People may not realize the excellent life lessons these children are learning from these simple 40 minutes classes. Not only are they learning how to play one of the world’s favorite sports, they are gaining social knowledge that will stay with them forever. Soccer is a sport that requires communication, teamwork, and positive attitudes.

Sounds a lot like every day life, right? Because these kids are young, being apart of a soccer team teaches them how to be social and make friends with the people around them, which will be very handy for when they are growing up. If they are able to learn how to be outgoing when they are in preschool or kindergarten, school and future life experiences will be much easier.

When I was watching the class, I noticed a little girl in the beginning who seemed shy and embarrassed to do the soccer drills. When I asked her if she was okay she replied quietly, “Yeah, but I don’t want to mess up.” Because the coaches had the other children encourage and cheer for everyone, it helped the little girl gain confidence, and she ended up having an great time and scored a goal! By the end, she was chanting the other kids names for them to score goals just as they did for her. As simple as this seems, the little girl was able to break out of her shell and make friends from that one experience. Soccer has really helped me in my life too. I started playing when I was just five years old and now I am nineteen and still loving it. All of my closest friends are my soccer teammates and we all push each other to do good in school and life.

For me, not only am I staying active, I have learned to be dedicated to everything I commit to, I am able to communicate with people very easy, and I also know how to listen to rules and follow them.

I am totally not the type of person that will go outside and run on my own, but I look forward to going to practice to be with my friends while being productive. My team (as are most teams) is required to have a certain grade point average, so that disciplines us all to make sure our school work is going good. I give soccer and my coaches a lot of the credit for who I am today.

I was so happy to see those kids playing because I know the experience they are getting. It is hard to understand how children this young can be affected so much from these classes but it will be very apparent when they are older. In my opinion, the three main qualities a person needs in life is, being social (communicate well), dedication, and having a good attitude. With those three attributes, a person is able to do well in school, make friends, and eventually get a job. Any parent worried about how their child will do in life, sign them up for soccer!!

Soccer is a huge part of Lindsay’s life. She has been playing since she was six years old and started playing club soccer at the age of 10. Her club team was even seventh in the nation and second in the state at one point.

Lindsay also has a desire to help others. She graduated last spring from UCSD with a degree in Psychology and she currently runs grief groups for children in the San Fernando Valley at Our House Grief Support Center. She has a lot of volunteer experience, such as teaching Vacation Bible School, organizing UCSD’s Relay For Life and working in an Autism Lab at UCSD.

She enjoys being around kids and cannot wait to teach them about the sport she loves so much.

She enjoys being apart of a team and that love followed her into Varsity soccer at Louisville High School. As the captain, she was talking to division 1 college coaches about playing at their schools when in a preseason high school game she tore her ACL. Her desire to play didn’t fade, after rehab she joined the club soccer team at UC San Diego only to tear her ACL again. She went through another long process of physical therapy so she could continue to play the sport she loves. She now enjoys playing pick up with her friends and is currently on an indoor soccer team. She also just finished her first season as the assistant varsity soccer coach at Louisville High School.

Lindsay’s goal is to be a social worker and she is currently waiting to hear back from graduate schools. With her desire to help and love for kids and soccer, Lindsay is very excited to be a part of Soccer Shots!