B.J.'s rant.

Just back from coaching an eleven-year-old boys' football team. Everyone wants to be the quarterback but few can throw accurately and even less than catch. Once play settles down and players get comfortable with being either offensive or defensive squads everyone has fun, even when competiting with other schools.
I was at a U-18 league team soccer game on Sunday and after one team went ahead six goals to nil I had to wonder who looked at the registration and put the teams together. Being familiar with a Nanaimo representative team that made it through to the BC Provincial Finals as U-12's, U13's, U15's and U'16's, and actually won the title as U-13's, I remembered how frustrated and disappointed the boys were when the Nanimo Youth Soccer Club dropped their support for them - meaning U-17 and U18 teams had to disband after all those many years of development.
To get back to the league game, four or five of the players on the winning team were from the disbanded rep. team, while only one was playing on the losing team. Furthermore, the winning team had three experienced goalies while the losing side had none and had to play rocks-paper-scissors to see who would go between the posts. Were all players having fun? No. Was the winning side satisfied with six goals? No. Was the lone rep. player on the losing side subjected to targeting and taunting? Yes.
So I'm thinking, whose responsible for this inequality, and does anyone care, other than myself?

The Weilmoringle Kid - now available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook!

audiobook narrated by the author.

  “My most successful novel, The Weilmoringle Kid, is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook (Narrated by myself). 

 

Click here for download information.      

      

Thank you very much.

Brian J. Pettit

THE WEILMORINGLE KID.

The Weilmoringle Kid is a city youth just out of college dispatched at the whim of government to Weilmoringle, a drought-and-fly-ridden sheep station in the Australian Outback.

    Overwhelmed by the heat, dust and flies and the prospect of enduring three years in the desolate environment, the kid strives to give the pioneer assignment a ‘fair go’. His first task is to build a school! Seventeen students appear on opening day, mostly Aboriginal children with no previous learning. There are no desks, book, blackboards, chalk, paper or supplies of any kind. There has never been electricity – and it hasn’t rained at Weilmoringle for two years. Within weeks, the enrolment swells to fifty-seven, children from five years in age to fifteen.

     This is an autobiography that reads like an adventure novel, an inspiring story of resiliency with a good dose of Aussie humour at work; a story of a young man’s efforts to gain a surer sense of identity and independence. The characters are unconventional, from the postman who masterminds the advent of public education to the twelve-year-old Aboriginal boy in school for the first time and determined to depart some lessons of his own to induce the teacher to stay.

“A story told without fancy but with the flavour of those days”.  Barry Broadfoot.

“Pettit has a fine sense of shape and prose style as fresh and strong as anyone could hope for. I expect to worry about those kids for awhile.” Jack Hodgins.

   

“A gem of a book, one written with all the humour and wit of a Stephen Leacock novel.”  The Saanich News.