Lead from among Published Dec. 15, 2015 By Senior Airman Joshua King Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst Public Affairs JOINT BASE MCGUIRE-DIX-LAKEHURST, N.J. -- I love sports. Growing up, I played just about every sport that you can think of. I wanted to pass that love of the game on to a younger generation. Now, my experience with kids was something else. I have none. I had no idea what to expect when I volunteered to coach youth soccer for 6 and 7 year olds. Here's what I learned in my first five minutes: they don't disappoint, they have crazy amounts of energy, don't like to listen to anything you say and they are loud - SO LOUD. I'm just thankful that I had an assistant coach there to help corral them and teach them some of the basics. I went into the season with high hopes for winning as a team. Even though league rules don't let you keep score, everyone, including the kids, keeps track and wants to win. One of my biggest challenges was knowing that if you could teach them to work as a team they could do so much better. We had some real talent, but that was our biggest flaw. You can imagine this gaggle of 6 and 7 year olds storming the field, looking like a group of individuals just wearing the same color by happenstance. We even went so far as to steal the ball from our own teammates. My fellow coach and I had to teach them to pass the ball to each other and work together to accomplish something bigger than what they could do on their own. So that's what we did at practice, all practice, every practice. Countless times we told them: "Work as a team, pass it to your teammates," But then it started to sink in. They began to work well together on the practice field. Saturdays were a different story. When the games came around it was like they forgot everything they had learned, as kids will do. I started feeling aggravated. "I don't have any relation to a single one of these kids why am I still coming if they don't even listen to me," I thought to myself. But then I realized what the issue was: a leader can't be effective when he does not consider himself part of the team he is leading. It was that final Saturday when we finally worked as a team. Everything clicked, we were passing the ball to each other, cheering each other on, forgiving each other's mistakes and moving on. Going in to the final game, the team had scored a single goal the whole season. I didn't mind that we hadn't won a game but I knew the kids needed it. Scoring goals and winning games are huge confidence builders and we hadn't done either. But that day we became a team on the game field, we won. You should've seen the looks on their faces - it was worth every struggle.