{"id":13396,"date":"2025-10-03T01:44:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T06:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=13396"},"modified":"2025-10-03T03:06:28","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T08:06:28","slug":"catching-up-checking-in-and-no-need-to-be-afraid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=13396","title":{"rendered":"catching up, checking in, and no need to be afraid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Three beautiful things from my past week:<\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/spriteshoots\/54829114379\/in\/dateposted\/\" title=\"Autumnal Sunset\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/54829114379_141765ccac_w.jpg\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\" alt=\"Autumnal Sunset\"\/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<p>1. Karen and I spend a few hours catching up on the phone to start the week. <\/p>\n<p>2. I sit the middle school practice players down and ask them what they enjoy most about volleyball &#8212; and what frustrates them. They want more serving practice, and they like how supportive everyone is (and being able to feel like experts in their gym classes!). But overall, they&#8217;re having fun and feel they&#8217;re getting better, which was a relief for me to hear.<\/p>\n<p>3. As I hoped, the exercise of dropping a (kid-friendly, very soft) volleyball on your head is an excellent introduction to ball proximity for the 5-to-7-year-old crowd for the first day of coaching. No one ducked out of the way they often do, afraid that the ball will hurt when we gently toss it in their vicinity.<\/p>\n<p>How about you? What&#8217;s been beautiful in your world lately?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Three beautiful things from my past week: 1. Karen and I spend a few hours catching up on the phone to start the week. 2. I sit the middle school practice players down and ask them what they enjoy most about volleyball &#8212; and what frustrates them. They want more serving practice, and they like [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-three-beautiful-things"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>catching up, checking in, and no need to be afraid - sprite writes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.spritewrites.net\/?p=13396\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"catching up, checking in, and no need to be afraid - sprite writes\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Three beautiful things from my past week: 1. 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