Wild Girls

So, I coach fourth graders in swimming for an Upper East Side school.  There are 3 classes in the grade and they rotate.  This next class 4A I know from coaching cross country.  They are wild. Big personalities, hilarious, smart and fun and I like them a lot. But wild. With swimming you really need the girls to pay attention, so throughout the day I was anticipating the crazy.

We take a bus to the swimming pool.  The big girls (6th graders) take a bus to the bronx and their bus is always on time, waiting for them down the block.  We wait and wait for our bus that always stops right in front of the school. That day a bus stops, we get on and go. We were on the wrong bus.  The bus driver adjusts quickly and heads to our pool located just 10 blocks away.  My fellow coach on the phone, tells me, “you wouldn’t believe what’s going on.” More on this in a bit.

I’m not paying too much attention because the girls are hilarious.  They want to see Fifty Shades Darker.  Ummm, in about 9 years I say.  Why, they say, is it scary?  You could say that I say.  Are there ghosts?  I laugh.

One of the hardest parts of coaching 9 year old girls  is getting them dressed after swimming.  They move frantically about but somehow all that movement doesn’t seem to involve getting dressed and drying their hair.  The locker room is chaos.   I’m calling out – 7 minutes left, 6, when someone hands me a baby.

A woman with two toddlers and a baby, had entered the locker room and thrusted the baby into my hands. Will you take him? she asks, as she enters the rest room.  Uh, yeah, I say. I continue to move the girls along.  The girls ask the obvious question, “how did you get that baby?” “Someone gave him to me,” I say.  The baby is red faced and screaming so I’m holding him at arms length.  I think, okay, enough screaming baby and hand him off to my fellow coach.  So the woman with the toddlers hands the baby to one woman and retrieves it from another.

We arrive back to school and learn the complete story of the wrong bus.  The swim coach of the 6th graders (whose bus we took) made a big scene.   In front of parents and school administrators.  Screaming - that’s not my bus!  That’s not my bus driver!  The Syrian Ambassador was in residence down the street and the cops needed to keep traffic moving.  Move it, move it, they screamed.  And here’s this coach acting like a maniac because it was the wrong bus.  Well, she got to where she needed to go and so did we.

The girls were great.  The world around them was chaotic but they were great.  All in a day's work.  This week it's a new class.  Stay tuned.