I did my student teaching back in the spring of 1979.  My supervising teacher was resigning from education to open his own construction business.  Since I had made the decision at the age of 27 to get my teaching certificate and leave the business world, I was a bit baffled by his decision, and a bit concerned that I had made a mistake.  When asked, this is what he told me was his reasoning.  He said that he never knew the results of his hard work.  When he built something, he could see a finished product. Not so in teaching.  This bothered him enough to make him leave the profession.  And he was right.  It was very rare to ever meet a former student and catch up on how he or she was doing.  But as I have said before in earlier posts, that all changed with the invention of social media.  Once again, I was able to spend time last Saturday with former students.  For me it was almost like a family reunion.

I introduced readers to Dominique in the post “Comedy is not Pretty”. and Aaron in “Aaron, Sarah, and CB.”  I got to see Dominique and Aaron on the Saturday of the City West Sports flag football championships.  Dominique runs City West Sports as well as serving as the head coach of one of the teams, the Silverbacks.  Dominique asked me if I could come one day and shoot some pictures to be used later for mailings and such.  I said sure, and by my good fortune, I picked the day of the championship games.  As it turns out, Aaron is also the head coach of another CWS team, the Warriors.  Both Dom and Aaron played football for me, and Aaron coached with me for 4 years.  I was looking forward to seeing how my former players would handle their head coaching duties.

They handled them quite well, thank you very much!

The Silverbacks and the Warriors both won the City West Sports championship  for their age group on Saturday.  It was fun to watch.

When they played for me, we had this play called Crisscross.  A double handoff play that usually scored whenever we ran it.  When Dominique was on my team, I made sure he would be the one to run it.  He had to switch positions to do so.  When he lined up to run the Crisscross,  you could hear the coaches on the other side yelling “Crisscross!  They are running the Crisscross!”  Didn’t help.  Dom scored.  I loved that play.

Early in the morning, I am taking pictures of Aaron’s first game.  The first play goes all the way for a touchdown.  After the game, I went over to Aaron to congratulate him and said, “through the camera lens, that first play looked suspiciously like the Crisscross.  Is it?”  Aaron confirmed that it was that play and he ran it all the time.  The legend of the Crisscross continues.

I also got to see a few more of my former students.  Sergio, Dom’s brother was there.  I caught up with him and his comedy career.  Aaron’s wife Sarah, whose maternity photos I shot, showed up with the newborn.  Aaron’s brother, Justin,  another former player,and his wife and 3 kids were there.  She is expecting a fourth.  Jason, a former student and player as well, was there along  with his fiance and two children.  Came to find out he works for the same company my wife does.  Throw in Aaron and Justin’s mom and dad and Dom and Sergio’s mom being there, it just turned out to be a great “reunion” and one of the best days.

Dom really put together an enjoyable, fun day.  Although football was the main event, there was a bouncy house, a face painter, a balloon animal maker, plenty of food and non stop music.  Way to go, Dom.  You done good!

The Banner Runthrough!

I remember once as we came out to start the second half of a game, a cheerleader came up to me in tears and said, “The team (sniffle) didn’t run through (sob) the banner we (sniff) we made for them (SOB)!”  Little things are important.  I am glad these young boys are learning this at an early age.

Cold Weather Gear

Head first down the bouncy house.

Yum! Hotdogs!

Balloon Art

Face Painting

The Cheerleaders.

The Payoff!

THE LOOK.  I think I know where they got it from.

Dominique, the founder of the feast that is City West Sports.

Aaron and the lovely Sarah

As I had the privilege of photographing Sarah’s maternity session, I think this would be a great time to see the Samuel Aaron.  Makes me almost rethink my decision not to photograph newborns.  Almost.

I encourage you to please check out the City West Website here and check out what they do.

Feeling much like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight, I have been extremely distracted today, so I have put off writing today’s post until now.  On the other hand, this is how I got through college, so I am used to working well under pressure.

A few random thoughts for today.

In an earlier post I mentioned the website style design by Sitehouse that I had won at the MJ2Day workshop.  However, I have been having troubles with downloading and uploading and side loading, if there is such a thing.  I took my time selecting the right choice of a template, finally placed my order and the shipped me a link.    Not knowing who they were dealing with, they put a one day expiration date on the link.  So a few days later when I went to upload it, it didn’t work.  Sitehouse graciously gave me the link again, this time with a two week window.  I did download the link, but I could not successfully upload it to Showit.  But thanks to Showit’s great online support team, namely a nice young fellow named Jason, I was walked through the correct steps to upload my chosen style design.  And there is nothing wrong with the Sitehouse design or the Showit site because they wouldn’t do the volume of business they do if they had faulty products.  It was all me.  I just don’t have the computer intuition and common sense to figure out what step I am missing.  Of course it was an easy fix and I just shook my head because I could have and should have figured it out myself.

My statistics for this blog show that on occasion someone visits my About page.  Unfortunately, my About page is under construction.  I like to write…I am not good at writing about myself.  Time to work on the about page.

My throwback picture of today goes back to my first year of teaching.  I was at Glendale High School.  The band director was gung ho into school spirit.  On every Friday during football season, he would take the band marching around campus playing the fight song.  This happened on my prep hour, so one Friday I grabbed a tuba and another coach grabbed a bass drum and we marched along with the band.  This moment was captured for all eternity by one of the school newspaper photographers.  I started teaching teaching at the age of 29.  I look like a child.