The clinics we've been having over the last 2 weeks have been stretching my faith, my patience, and my understanding of these communities. We've now completed 5 of the 6 sessions and the results have been varied. We've had a few really talented players, and some really bad ones. We've had some that work really hard, and some that are quite lazy. We've had some kids that are respectful and do the right thing, and some that just want to goof off. So all of that has been stretching.
Last week we struggled to get kids involved from Masiphumelele, the black township near us. I'm still not sure totally what the answer is there, but we need to think more strategically about how to get those kids involved.
We are also continuing to learn how to best communicate information and who the people are that we can trust to do things for us. It's all been quite positive, but I wish I didn't always have so much to learn!! When will I start to know it all?!?! (And not just in my own mind!)
Now we're wrestling with which kids to invite into the program. There are a few talented kids with questionable attitudes, do we take the risk? There are some kids that aren't great players, but have great athletic ability, do we trust that we can teach them how to play? In "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell (an amazing book, by the way) he talks about people becoming experts in their field when they have reached 10,000 hours of practice. Basically his premise is that if somebody starts with a certain threshold of talent that the difference is the time put into their craft. So, we're wrestling with whether or not our task is to "discover" talented players or to "develop" talented players. It's quite an interesting process and we have a lot of big decisions to make over the next month or so.
We'd appreciate your thought and prayers to that end. After tomorrow's final day I'll post some pictures of this 2nd group of kids.
Casey
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