I am so fucking good

That’s right people. I oooooooooooown. I am the master of six year-old psychology. *inhales* Ok, I’m calm now.

As I mentioned, I teach tennis to small, charming children. I’ve held several jobs as instructor of one kind of sport or another, and have thus noticed that this job comes with one “extra-fun” aspect: PICKING UP THE GODDAMN BALLS.

Think about it. Soccer, baseball, football, basketball—they all use one ball per TWO TEAMS of kids—maybe a few extra for passing practice. You rarely exceed the golden ratio of one ball per kid. Tennis, in the infinite wisdom of the bored upper-class who designed the damn game, requires, oh……FIFTY balls per kid. I have a small hopper and it holds over 300 of the elusive things. Convincing the six year olds to pick them up? A challenge.

There’s a few tricks that we all use. “Oh, let’s see if you guys can BREAK THE WORLD RECORD TIME for picking up the balls!!!” (The world record time is, conveniently, exactly two seconds more than however long it takes them.)

You can encourage them to build pyramids on their rackets. (Highly prone to backfiring when said pyramids inevitably collapse, rescatteirng the balls.)

The above is NOT the surest way to backfire. That honor belongs to having a contest for whoever picks up the most balls. They WILL figure out that it is easier to steal the balls from each others’ rackets.

So. Amidst all of these half-failures, there has emerged one winner. The strong. The victorious. THE method. As the creator, I like to refer to it as “Lying through one’s teeth.”

It’s very simple. When it’s time to pick up the balls, I don’t say anything. I start to pick them up myself. Slowly.

Eventually, one child (8 to 5 that it’s a girl) will start to also pick up the balls and/or ask me what I’m doing. Acting at this point is key.

“Oh no,” I say in a serious tone. “Only grown-ups can pick up the balls. You guys just wait ‘till I’m done.”

Did I just see seven kids with ARMFULS of balls? Oh yeah.

I can pretend not to notice for two or three rotations, which is about an hour. When I “see” them yellow-handed, I usually announce in a low tone that since they were SO GOOD today and SO GROWN-UP, we can keep it a secret. (For maximum effect, pinky-swear.)

I suppose I shouldn’t be so proud of outsmarting a group of first-graders, but I no longer really care.