Remember My Name
I admit it, I’m awful at remembering people’s names.
It’s certainly not a recent phenomenon as I’ve always struggled and tended to skirt around the problem by adopting a well-honed tactic of geniality that avoided any direct reference to a name.
Now this is fine when you meet former acquaintances but starts to get a little tricky when you organise a weekly kids soccer club at the local YMCA.
Banish all thoughts that you may have at this moment of a formal, well drilled, Ajax youth academy type soccer club.
The YMCA is located in a small ex-mining valley and welcomes over 100 kids, aged 6 to 16, through its doors for a Friday evening youth club with activities ranging from computers, games-consoles, disco, pool, table-tennis, crafts, the all important tuck-shop, all the good stuff that you would expect at a youth club, including a soccer club.
Now, the first hour of the soccer club tends to comprise of younger children who need a little coaxing and direction but who by their very nature are full of enthusiasm and as such the game tends to comprise of 20 children hovering around the ball like bees around the honeypot. The second hour is quite the opposite in terms of age, experience and ability. The group can consist of 25 –35 young teenagers, mostly boys but girls regularly attend, from the local vicinity. All credit should go to the small group of YMCA staff and volunteers for running not only the Friday but weekday clubs which have operated over the last 84 years.
As players tend to drift in and out on a regular basis, perhaps present one week only to return a month later, my ability to remember their names becomes very tenuous.
You also have to remember that this is Wales and as well as your regular sounding Jaden’s and Logan’s you have very similar sounding Welsh names such as Ioan, Iolo, Iwan, Ieuan which tends to lead to perplexed stares from kids when you’re calling them different names.
It goes without saying that each teenager present is aware of each other’s ability when playing soccer and as such teams are selected based upon these different strengths and weaknesses with the added proviso that each player has to fulfil the role of forward, defence and keeper during the course of the hour.
This tends to be the only area of contention during the evening as goalkeeping and defence are certainly not as popluar as scoring goals and basking in the adulation of your teammates.
That’s enough information surrounding the ergonomics of the evening now let’s get back to the main point of this article.
As previously intimated the kids form a disorderly line which I tend to inspect like an archetypal army sergeant allocating each player to a particular team.
One evening I noticed a lad who I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. Switching from short-term to long-term memory I recalled his name and nonchalantly stated, ‘Alfie, team 2’ at which he punched the air and shouted ‘he remembered my name’ before joining the rest of his cohorts.
“A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” — Dale Carnegie
For this lad at least to be named resonated more that evening than attending the soccer club. It underlies the importance of recognition and identity particularly in young teenagers who may struggle with self-esteem. So, remembering a name can have far wider implications than you could imagine.
