Roger lay on the grass, where he had just fallen, soaked and sweating profusely, unsure of what had just happened. Above him, hovered the sixteen pretty thirteen-year-old girls of his soccer team. They circled him slowly with a maniacal glee written all over their faces having just pelted him with sixteen water-balloons.
He wasn’t hurt for he was sure that the only thing that was bruised was his ego. He had tried this particular game numerous times with both of his son’s soccer teams. It had always worked. But what now had changed? He hadn’t a clue.
He’d always picked late August to run his “Terminator” gambit. He would show up to a soccer practice dressed in all black with dark sunglasses and two giant Supersoaker water pistols in tow. Standing like a dark sentinel in front of the goal net, he challenged the kids to get the soccer ball passed him into the net.
If they shied away or hesitated, he shot them with the Supersoaker. It was great fun and generally the kids didn’t mind getting cooled off on a very hot day. It taught them a valuable lesson, Roger reasoned: that even though things get tougher at the end, they could keep going and succeed.
At the end of the practice though would come the real surprise, he would give them all a chance to “get even.” If they could catch him, they got the chance to soak him with a water balloon. It had amazed him that kids who just minutes before were complaining about being tired and how much they needed to rest, suddenly found newborn energy to chase him with water balloons.
Roger was in good shape and it had always taken the boys several minutes to catch him, each pelting him in turn. But not today and not with this girls team. Something had changed.
Today, exactly as in the past, he sat the kids down in a row, about 10 feet apart from each other and had placed a water balloon a few feet in front of each of them. As soon as he blew the whistle to start the exercise, he started to run, then stopped to watch something very curious. The girls weren’t coming after him.
He watched from the distance as they each collected their water balloon from the ground. All sixteen formed a giant huddle in the middle of the field, and listened for instructions from Lisa, their chosen team Captain.
As the huddle, broke, Roger knew he was in trouble for they moved not as individuals bent on a mission, but as four separate teams each moving in a different directions and cutting off any of Roger’s escape routes. Then it happened, in trying to watch everything at once, he slipped. Sprawled on the ground, he could only cover up, holding his head, as the barrage of water balloons hit him. All sixteen water balloons seem to come at him almost simultaneously. They’d cornered him in less than a minute.
What Roger didn’t know in that moment was that boy’s teams have a natural tendency to compete – against each other. In short, they wanted to be first to clobber him. The girls on the other hand were very good at cooperating. They acted as a cohesive unit bent on a mission.
Roger repeated the exercise in subsequent girl’s practices in order to make sure it hadn’t been a fluke. Only slowly then did he come to realize that he’d never had a chance. The girls, it seems, had outwitted and outnumbered him sixteen to one.