Entry #5: The Soccer Star

Apparently, I gave up a brilliant career in soccer before I even knew it had begun.

I grew up in a soccer family. My dad coached, my brother and sister played, and I usually sat on the sidelines, playing with a soccer ball, kicking it back and forth with whomever wanted to, throwing it up in the air and catching it repeatedly. Dinner times revolved around soccer practices. And I spent a LOT of Saturdays and Sundays on a soccer pitch, watching my siblings playing teams from cities I never knew existed, amusing myself with whatever I could find. If I was lucky, there was a concession stand, and I could pester my mom into buying me a drink and a packet of crisps or a candy bar.

It was an exciting time to live where I did...soccer was just catching on, everyone wanted to be on a team, and the away tournaments were entertaining and exotic. We had a lot of friends because of it, and the phone rarely stopped ringing. We were always in the car, the trunk loaded with nets of balls, orange flags, a large black metal box which held our professional level first-aid kit, bags of lime in case the out of bounds lines were blurred by rain, and a giant cooler of Gatorade or Pripps Plus (which was, I'm proud to say, what the Washington Diplomats drank when they played).

My dad was in the thick of it, helping to establish teams, choosing uniforms, designing patches, corresponding with other soccer clubs in the state, and scouting out new places to hold games. I'm proud to say that the patch my father designed was used for decades as a symbol of our soccer club. If you wanted a question answered about youth soccer in our area, he was the man everyone went to. And the year he thought up and helped run a brand new tournament in our area was probably the most exciting ever, although I later found out it nearly caused my mother to divorce him.

Soccer was the world in which we lived, breathed, and had our being. Every kid in our area wasn't referred to by their name but by the year he or she was born ("He's a 71" or "She's a 68, but she plays with the 67s"). At the end of every season we always had an enormous awards ceremony at the local community center, where particularly outstanding individuals were honoured, victories shared, and endless platters of food consumed.

And...there were trophies. There was nothing I loved half so much as a trophy with my name on it. Words cannot frame how intensely jealous I was when I saw my brother and sister being awarded a trophy at the end of a season. The shining metal dazzled me, and even though they would let me hold their trophy, it never was the same. Our mantle piece over the fireplace held many, many trophies, and the wall behind our sofa was crowded with plaques, none of them mine. I vowed one day I would have more trophies than everyone put together.

My father was particularly good about taking care of his own teams. He had two daughters and was very vocal in establishing a healthy girls' soccer league. He met a lot of resistance, for ever in the liberated 70s there were those who felt girls had no place on the soccer pitch unless it was to bring drinks to the sweating, athletic males. He argued long and hard for equal play and had a large hand in establishing WAGS (the Washington Area Girls Soccer League). At the end of each season he coached a girls' team, he always had a big party at the house where he presented each girl with a trophy, no matter how the team had done in the league, preferring to reward effort and team spirit more than rankings. Then there was a lot of food consumed, a lot of dancing, and a great big slumber party or, if it was the end of spring soccer, a HUGE backyard picnic and a grill that cooked so many hamburgers and hot dogs it didn't cool down for days after.

As most of this happened before I was five, I was usually a spectator and not a participant, lugging nets of balls to and fro, running with cups of water to hot and thirsty players when play had stopped, and carrying my dad's clipboard. Everyone knew who I was ("Oh, you're Mike's youngest! Aren't you a helpful girl??"), and all in all, it was a grand time for me, even when the weather was cold and wet...that just meant I could get muddy without my mother yelling at me because everyone was muddy too!

During the months of December, January, and February, the only soccer available was indoor soccer which my dad didn't do, claiming he needed a break between seasons. So if the weather was clement during those times, there would be pick-up games of soccer in our back yard (which was flat and rectangular) with the neighbourhood kids. I could play then with my friends and not feel left out. And when it really was too horrific outside to play, I settled for kicking a soccer ball against our hearth in our rec room, over and over again.

I was about five when I started playing on my own team in the Squirt League. I remember proudly donning the bright orange t-shirt and taking to the field, terrified that I'd mess up and somehow put the ball into the wrong goal. My dad had seen early on that I was not a particulalry fast runner but I was very, very good about passing and controlling the ball, so he advised me to wait for the ball to come to me, drive it up the sideline, pass it to the striker for a goal, then fall back.

But here's the thing about Squirt League soccer matches. The game begins with everyone in their places, having been placed there by the coach, the ball gets kicked off, and suddenly, every child on the pitch (except the two who are off picking daisies or chasing after butterflies on the sidelines) has formed into a massive wad of uniforms and kicking feet that is more like a rugby scrum than soccer team. The ball pops out, the herd chases it, and it pretty much goes on like that for 45 minutes. Rarely does the ball ever make it to the goal, and if it does, the goalie (who's wearing gloves 15 sizes too big and knee pads so bulky they could double as body army) flaps his arms in a panic, takes off running, flings himself to the ground to catch the spiralling ball, then bursts into tears as it zips past him and into the net. The ref blows the whistle, several kids sob uncontrollably, several more scream they've been injured, and eventually the game resets. And afterward, everyone goes out for Slurpees, not really caring who won.

Why anyone thought organising that many young kids into a league is beyond me. But I suppose they had to start somewhere.

I'm proud to say I was the exception. I'd spent years watching my brother and sister playing in games. I'd learnt the fundamentals of the sport at my father's knee, reading play books, watching professionals playing on the telly, going to Washington Diplomats games, and observing my dad endlessly moving Xs and Os around on his dry erase clipboard with the outlines of a soccer field on it...sometimes he even did this on the back of his church bulletin when the sermon got too long. I understood, probably way too young, how a team was meant to function, the importance of drills, and probably the biggest thing...how to trap and control the ball. I'd spent three entire winters banging a little size 3 against a brick hearth, something my father told me was fundamental to my learning how the ball moved, especially since I always did it barefoot (he often times had completely barefoot practices, ignoring the moaning and groaning of people as he told them the best way to handle the ball with one's feet was to remove the shoes. It worked, too...).

So once I was able to see that 99% of the other players on the pitch had absolutely no inkling of how the game was played, I was able to grab the ball as it popped out from the scrum and run like a demon with it, dribbling down the sidelines and slamming it into the goal, time after time after time. To be honest, I never knew what the score was. I just liked having the ball in my control because with an older brother and sister, "Keep Away" was pretty popular, and it was rare the ball was ever in my possession.

I became the top scorer in the league. Coaches desperately wanted me on their teams. I was always the Center Striker, probably the most coveted position on the squad, for 7 or 8 seasons running, surprising considering I wasn't that fast of a runner. But I knew where to be and how to aim my kicks, and I guess that was all that mattered. Nothing could stop me, and I had my picture in a lot of newspapers. Every season I was named to the All Star Teams. Soon my own trophies were crowding the mantle piece, and it looked like nothing could stop me.

Somewhere in all of this, my father phoned up a local soccer newspaper and told them of my prowess, and one week later, a reporter came knocking on the door to interview me.

I remember being really tired because she'd shown up during the late afternoon when all I really wanted was a nap. My mom tried to encourage me to talk about myself, something I have no trouble with today!, but I truly had nothing to say. To me, what happened on the field stayed on the field. I didn't have any secrets or insights or words of wisdom--I was 7 years old, for crying out loud--and my mom in fit of desperation brought out our old photo albums to show the floundering reporter how active I'd always been. I looked at those instead, bored out of my mind and sleepy, and eventually the reporter asked in desperation, "What's your favourite colour??"

"Red," I replied. "Or purple. I don't know."

I really feel sorry for that poor woman. I don't know if I really was an outstanding soccer player or if my dad was just convinced I was and tried to convince everyone else. When the magazine came out two months later, I was stunned at how wonderful the article made me sound. My dad cut it out and taped it to his scrapbook proudly.

I stopped play when I was about 10 because I was simply bored of the sport. I was tired of the early games, the late-night practices, the constant ranking of me against the other players in the county. Because of all the games, I'd had to turn down numerous party invitations and always had to say no to anything occurring on a Saturday. And I was starting to miss church and Sunday School. My brother and sister had stopped playing but my dad hadn't stopped coaching. I think I broke his heart a little when I said I didn't want to be on the team in the fall. He kept my jersey folded next to his desk for about a year and never mentioned it again.

I started playing again when I was 12 but in a much less competitive capacity (intramural as opposed to select). By then genetics had begun to kick in, and I had become quite heavy and slow. I was put in goal where my drop kick hang time made records in the league.

But by 13, I was done. One game against a neighbouring city had blown out my knee, and I could no longer run. I suffered with a "trick knee" for five years until I had surgery on it my senior year. Chronic arthritis has guaranteed I'll never play again, and to tell the truth, I'm not bothered. Maybe I'll coach my own kids one day and I can tell them how I once watched the great Johann Cruyff make a goal from the midline, kicking a ball so arced and perfect it looked like it was carried by an angel and deposited just under the lip of the goal bar over the outstretched finger tips of the goalie. Or how Sonny Askew used to weave between the defenders like they were standing still and shoot the ball into the net like an Exocet missile. Maybe I can just share with them the beauty of the game with its odd ballet.

Either way, it will be what they want it to be and they can stop playing when it stops being fun. That freedom is the least I can do.