Soccer Field Respect

(Revised from May 2009)

Back in the fourth grade our son, John, played recreational soccer for a team called The Storm. The recreational league played on a series of fields across from Parkview High School, which was no more than a mile from our house, which is relevant only because all of my kids’ activities had to be close by for my convenience, but is completely unnecessary for the telling of this story.

The Storm was a team that was formed during the fall season along with all the others. The league had hundreds of players, perhaps as many as a thousand, from the under six-year olds to the teenagers, all in two-year age groups. I heard that the league actually had “drafts” where the coaches picked their sons, and their son’s friends, and chose the best players they knew. Most of these kids had been playing soccer for several years. Most of these coaches had been coaching for several years. They, “they” being kids and coaches, went to spring camps. They went to summer camps. They knew each other well and all had decided in the fall to play soccer together for the rest of the year. Actually, they had decided that year or earlier that they would be specializing in soccer for the rest of their athletic careers.

It was during John’s time with The Storm that I came to the unhappy realization that parents, and organized sports, were forcing young kids to choose the sport at which they would specialize through middle school, high school, and college. If you were going to be any good, if you were going to be competitive with your classmates, you had to choose a sport in elementary school and stick with it into your adolescent years. You could not wait to find out if you would grow into someone big (football), tall (basketball), skilled (baseball), fast (most anything), or tenacious, skilled AND gifted like God’s greatest athletes who are wrestlers, distance runners, and distance swimmers. You could look it up! The little kids who accidentally choose the right sport for their fully matured physical and mental makeup will be successful someday. The rest will have modest careers in sports, possibly in a sport they do not love. What a shame.

John had tried some baseball in the backyard. I never knew enough about baseball to teach him anything nor the ability to determine whether he was any good at it. He tried church league basketball. He was doing the county recreation league swimming in the summers. He’d done peanut/munchkin soccer the previous year which resembled a swarm of moths around a bright light. He’d tried youth wrestling a couple nights and did not care for it. We sent Ann and John to Emory Sports Camp several summers where they were exposed to all kinds of sports. Jean and I wanted the kids to have some experience at several sports and hopefully find one or two they could love for a lifetime. We (in truth, I) secretly hoped that they would be good at something, but the important thing was to find a sport they would choose to pursue for a lifetime.

So John had tried all of these other sports. I don’t know what he was doing in the fall, but it was not soccer. Kids who wanted to sign up for soccer mid-year and play in the spring games were randomly assigned to teams. The kids who signed up mid-year were generally trying soccer for the first time or nearly so. The teams they were joining were made up of kids who had been playing soccer for years, and had been playing together as a team for the fall season at least, and probably the previous year as well. This is the environment John was walking into.

The kids on John’s team were experienced. They knew each other well. They knew the coaches and the coaches knew them. These kids had ball skills that John didn’t have. They did things with the ball so quickly I had no idea what they had done. John was also one of the youngest on the team. The team was made up of nine and ten-year olds, with most being in the fifth grade while John was in the fourth grade. By every attribute you could conceive, John was an outsider on this team, and he suffered for it. He was not readily included.

During John’s soccer practice I would run laps around the perimeter of the soccer facility to get in my own workout. I would try to watch what was going on without being noticed and to avoid any semblance of interference. I did not want to be a smothering parent. I wanted him to have some privacy; to try things; to succeed or fail on his own; to get hurt without a parent rushing to his aid; to cry in pain or frustration without embarrassment; to get knocked down and decide on his own to get back up. I saw him take his share of knocks. It hurt to see this, but I kept on running knowing these were problems that John had to solve on his own.

One day when I finished my run and was hanging around the practice field I noticed John was running after this big older kid on the team. Let’s call him Bubba. John was red-faced and clearly ticked-off about some abuse he had suffered. Bubba had done something to John and John wanted revenge. Bubba was running easily; zigging here and zagging there, faking left and going right, and John could not catch him. After only a moment or two the other kids on the team started to notice, and they started pointing at the two of them and laughing at John’s futile attempt at vengeance. Bubba was laughing and enjoying John’s inability to catch him.

If you have ever run for 30 seconds at the fastest speed you can manage, which is a distance of around 200 meters, you know first-hand how very tired you can get. After about 30 seconds this is exactly what happened. Bubba was getting tired. All of the zigs and zags were taking a toll. John was not getting tired and seemed more determined than ever. This was my first observation that John had been born with the gift of stamina. Though John trailed, he had the advantage of cutting corners. For every ten steps Bubba took, John was taking nine, and wasn’t wasting any breath on laughing. John was getting closer. John was on a mission. John was pissed.

Pretty soon Bubba ran out of breath for laughing. Bubba was running for survival. A desperate look crept onto his face. The team was still laughing, but they were the only ones. John was getting closer while Bubba was getting more and more frantic. John may have been smaller and slower, but he was determined to have some amount of justice even if he got pounded in return.

I did not know what to do. I was afraid of what John might do if he caught Bubba. I was also afraid of what Bubba might do to John. Are there rules in fights between kids; I was hoping so. As a father I am not supposed to condone violence, but Bubba had done some injustice to my son and I wanted him to receive justice by John’s hand.

We’d taught our kids not to fight, but I wondered if this might be a good thing for John, just this once. Doesn’t every kid deserve a measure of self-respect and the respect of their peers? The coaches were standing back doing nothing, so I stood back and did nothing, too.

John finally did catch Bubba. John caught him from behind while both were running. John reached out with both arms, grabbed both of Bubba’s shoulders, and pulled back hard. It was a cartoon moment. Bubba’s upper body suddenly stopped moving forward while his hips and legs continued on. He was laid out parallel to the ground, but still several feet in the air. Gravity then had its way with his body and he fell flat on his back, all points arriving simultaneously on the ground from a height of several feet with a sickening thud.

Everyone was silent and Bubba wasn’t moving. I was half afraid that Bubba was dead. John stood over Bubba looking down with his hands clenched in fists, as if to say, “Do you want any more?” Bubba had a shocked look on his face, and the air had clearly been knocked out of his lungs. Eventually Bubba took a big gasp of air and began to cry. John seemed satisfied with this and walked calmly away. In the meantime I saw John’s surprised teammates begin to whisper amongst themselves, “Did you see that”, and “Oh my god!”

The coaches made John and Bubba run laps as punishment. It was a small price to pay for respect.

I don’t remember those kids giving John a hard time after that incident. I still don’t think they passed the ball to him as often as they should have, and he rarely, if ever, got to play forward or goalie, but he had respect. I was very proud of him.

John played one more season of soccer the next year with a new team. That team lost every regular season game. In this league every team went into the championship playoffs. John’s team proceeded to win every playoff game with the exception of the championship final.
How fun is that?

Epilogue:
John’s most recent soccer games were with an intramural team while enrolled at the University of Virginia.

Way to go, John - Life of the Mind, and Life of the Body