A true neophiliac, Gus is head over heels for the new soccer game he’s learning. The color cards, the mailbox, the baby carriage — they’re still good, but the novelty and challenge of soccer outstrips the allure of all other toys.
It might be my fault too: anticipating the difficulty of both precision kicking as a skill and goal-scoring as a concept, I started right out with buttermints as rewards. What was I thinking? Gus loves the ball enough just for itself; focusing and targeting its actions are simply new ways to love it, no extra incentive needed. I’m going back to carrot coins, with only occasional candies.
Already the mints and the mere presence of an intriguing new contraption — the kids’ soccer net — have created a football fiend. If he isn’t chasing and kicking the ball, he biting the top of the goal and slinging it around. Wading through this irrational exuberance, I pursue my system doggedly. I start by placing the ball at the very front of the goal net and inviting Gus to kick it. He and it are so close that his kick usually succeeds in scoring a goal, accompanied by clicks and treats and celebrations. After a couple days, I place the ball a little farther from the goal, and now a kick that’s off-kilter will be a miss. He gets no treat for that, but I do hurry to replace the ball so he can try again.
Basic physics make it very difficult for a hoof to kick a ball straight. Think of a bat and a baseball, whose oppositely curved surfaces rarely meet at the sweet spot that creates a line-drive home run; instead most at-bats produce foul balls and popups and squigglers in front of the plate. Likewise Gus’s rounded hoof rarely contacts his playball straight on, so his kicks veer and squirt in all directions. At least he’s not being thrown curveballs and sliders to spin the physics even worse. Still, he’s gonna need a whole lot of practice.
Even if he were to break that code tomorrow, soccer skills involve more than feet. For Gus, his body orientation is a major issue. Since his fetlock joint pretty much only bends forward and back, he needs to stand head-on to the goal if he’s to have any chance of kicking it straight in. That means swinging his hips around square behind his shoulders, and that takes time that he’d rather spend heedlessly bashing the ball with his foot. I’m not sure how to teach that, but I’m hoping I won’t need to explicitly. With only a ittle coaching from me, he learned to step around as needed when rolling the chair over and tipping it upright, so maybe he’ll figure out the same for scoring a soccer goal. For now, I’m just luring him around as I hold the ball, not setting it down until he’s facing it pretty straight.
We’re in no rush to develop all these athletic nuances. Right now, and doubtless for weeks to come, we’re either kicking randomly all over the arena or we’re doing stationary place-kicks very near the mouth of the goal. And . . . he . . . scores!!