GOD'S ROSE OF SHARON

Connellsville Falcon Girls JV Tennis Team 2009

The Grand and Glorious Season of K-Dogg

This year when I was asked to take the position of girls junior varsity girls tennis coach at my alta mater, Connellsville Area Senior High, I was a little hesitant but I felt God wanted me to learn something valuable through the experience. My very first day on the job I was given a nickname, K-Dogg. “K” stands for Kessler of course and Dogg is native urban tongue aka high school slang and it means (friend). Everybody loves a cool nickname and K-Dogg was better than most of the ones I’ve been called in the past.

Coaching a high school sports team isn’t something I ever pictured myself doing. Especially a team that had twenty four teen-age girls whose lives consisted of ongoing drama, soap opera antics and hormonal imbalances. Not to mention, twenty four girls is a fairly large team considering in the previous years ten to twelve was the max turnout for the girls tennis program. Did I mention God has a divine sense of humor?

Mind you, if you include the varsity, there were forty girls altogether that made up the Connellsville high school tennis team. In layman’s terms, that’s HUGE! Now over the course of the season you might lose a few girls due to medical reasons, jobs or in the case of one girl, she simply didn’t like me, I mean she didn’t like K-Dogg but we still ended the year with twenty-one girls. I consider that a successful year indeed.

There were many challenges coaching a team of this level but the main one was learning all their names. Parents don’t name their daughters simple names like Kim or Patty or even Alice. No, the names we have to learn today are Kaycee, Kylie, Davi and even an Ameesha. Names are important so I learned them as soon as I could or I would find myself in the coach "K-Dogg house".

So what were the lessons both good and bad that I took home from my coaching experience this year?

1) The first one would have to be that away tennis matches on a school bus was pure torture. The bus seems to crawl down the highway and the voices of twenty some girls seem to be amplified by its steel frame.

2) The second lesson I learned was girls like to compliment each other on their wardrobe and tennis accessories even when they don‘t mean it.

3) Most teen-age girls like to hit a tennis ball like they were swatting flies.

4) If the temperature outside drops below seventy degrees their bodies seem to go into shutdown mode.

And last but not least….

5) PMS is not only a “mommy” thing.

Actually all kidding aside, I was the one that was blessed by this experience because I made over twenty more friends that call me coach K-Dogg and seemed to really enjoy themselves this year. They learned a lot about tennis, sportsmanship and most of all, about themselves. The most important lessons I tried to teach them was to always remember to believe in their own potential and to always dare to dream big. Which turned out to be that valuable lesson God wanted me to learn about myself as well.

The season of K-Dogg was a successful one. We won a few we lost even more. In the end, I know my JV team didn’t remember those wins or loses, they remembered the fun they had together and the feeling of what it felt like to belong to something bigger than they were, an ideal called team.

Congratulations lady Falcons on a winning and successful year.


In Christ Victorious,

James Robert Kessler aka K-Dogg


Connellsville Falcon Girls JV Tennis Team 2009 Part 2