One mad soccer dad

The 10 year old’s soccer team, the Green Geckos, is coming to the end of a rough season.

They started out looking strong, taking two of the first four games, and three of those were hard-fought close ones—2-1, 2-3, 3-2.  The other game they got trounced, 1-6.  But they came back after that to pick up their second win.

Unfortunately, it turned out that they’d played three of the weakest teams in the league.  The weakest team is the Green Geckos.

They’re just too young.  In a division of third, fourth, and a few fifth graders, their roster’s overstocked with 3rd graders.  Little third graders.  Jack is one of the few fourth graders and one of only three boys.  They’ve lost three in a row now, three games in which they haven’t scored a goal, and all three were against teams that were heavy—literally heavy—with fourth grade boys, plus a few large, fast fourth grade girls.  The Geckos have no natural scorers, and no real goalie.  Jack plays defense all game but he’s not quick enough to play goalie.  The girl who tends goal most of the time is quick and scrappy.  She’s going to be a good player someday.  But she’s barely four feet tall, if that.

There’s nothing that can be done about this.  Luck of the draw.  The kids are well-coached and they’re doing a good job of learning the game.  They’re just young and small and intimidated by the bigger, stronger kids on the other teams.  Our strikers—usually three little girls, and I’m describing their size; they are little girls even among little girls—can bring the ball down pretty well but they have a tendency to flinch when a defender charges them.

You can’t blame them.  It’s their 60 pounds dripping wet facing 95 pound juggernauts.  Actually, you watch them and you’re amazed they stand their ground at all.

What I’m saying is that if you’re the coach of the opposing team and you look out at the Geckos at the start of a game and see their tiny goalie and pint-sized strikers you have to think to yourself that as long as your team doesn’t keep driving at the big blond kid playing right corner you have a pretty good chance of scoring at will.

The coaches of the three teams the Geckos lost to before today saw their advantages in height, weight, speed, and experience and, being good sports, coached their games accordingly, leaving their subs in longer, having their best players play defense more than offense.  They played to win but they understood that they had the games sewn up by half time and relaxed.

The league has a gentleman and gentlewoman’s agreement that when a team gets five goals ahead, it stops trying to score.  Which is why the scores of the those three games were 6-1, 5-0, and 5-0, when the poor Geckos could easily have lost each of them by 12, at least.

The opposing coach today was no gentleman.

He had his team up 5-0 by the half.

They started the second half by scoring another goal.

Our coach went over to talk to him to remind him of the league’s 5 point rule.  He told her he was willing to abide by it, normally, but there was only one game left in the season after today, and a couple of his players hadn’t scored a goal yet all season and he figured they had their best shot against the Geckos.

This was like asking our coach if she minded if he used the Geckos for target practice.

Had it been me I’d have told him to take a knee.

But our coach decided to let it go.

The game continued.

But the other coach, instead of putting his subs in to let them have their goals, left his two best strikers in.  Both of them already had two goals apiece.

They each got one more.

They’d have scored three more apiece if Jack hadn’t gotten mad.  He left his position on the right side every time they brought down the ball and bulled into them.

I think the ref was on our side by that time.  She grew suddenly blind to fouls by the Geckos.

Game ended with the score 8-0.

Our coach had words with the other coach after the game.

He was a loudmouth as well as a welsher.  I heard him from the sidelines defending himself, claiming that he’d honored the agreement by having only the two strikers.  “I had four kids back on defense!” he yelled.  “Four back there not trying to score.”

And incidentally making sure the Geckos didn’t score either.

He’d left his starting goalie in too, and that kid was not four feet tall.

Got to give the Geckos a big hand.  They didn’t quit.  They played hard right to the end.  And they were in much better spirits at the end of today’s loss than they were after last week’s.

Not me though.  I was sore as hell.  And I didn’t try hard to hide it from the 10 year old on the walk home.

There are lots of ways to learn how to be a good sport.  One is to accept your losses with grace and a stoic resolve to play all the harder next time out, learning from not only from your mistakes but from all the things your opponents did right in order to beat you.  This lesson includes taking pride in the things you did right, even though you lost.

That was the lesson of the last two walks home.

But there are other lessons.  And today’s lesson was that some grown-ups are not good sports.

They are, in fact, jerks.

Lying, double-crossing jerks.

Not anybody you want to grow up to be like.

Comments

[jahf]

"Karate for whole life. Understand?"
--Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

[Jennifer]

Jack will learn that although sore, his father is a good sport because he did not post the other coach's picture for all to see what an a*****e really looks like.

My 64lbs 4th grader was too polite for soccer... she was always saying, "No, after you!" She was very good at passing to people in better spots though and that was a skill not many wanted to have.

[DanK]

As much as we all hate to admit it, Calvin and Hobbes' dad was right: losing does build character.

My little brother had a very similar experience in our cityonly won little league program. His first year he was put on a team of unwanteds. Somehow, 90% of these were the kids of immigrants/minorities whose parents were not Americanized enough to realize that parents should use their connections to get their kid on a "winning team" and avoid the league's laziest/worst coach.

Those Little Mets didn't win a single game and they forfeited more than their fare share for lack of 9 uniformed players or (one time) a coach. But, after two years of losing he was drafted to the next league up (for 10-12 year olds) and their team managed to win a city title. The losing only made that victory sweeter and I know it gave my brother a far more rational outlook on the role sports should play in one's life than myself.

Hope your Geckos grow a couple inches and kick some ass next year!

[sfmike]

I was on a hardball Little League team at age 8 in a small town where we played something like 40 games over the length of a long summer and lost every game. It was the same story, the luck of the town lottery, where we had all the small, uncoordinated 8-years olds who were being pitched to overhand with fastballs by kids who had already hit puberty. It was pretty ugly, including the time they threw me into the shortstop position for lack of anyone else and somebody hit a line drive which so scared me I turned my back and it hit me in the butt, quite effectively stopping the ball. Nobody could move for laughing.

However, there were a few silver linings. Nine of us on the team were named Mike, including the only really good ballplayer who was the coach's son. And the coach himself was one of the gentlest, most beautiful characters I've ever met. When we actually tied a game once, I'm not sure how, he treated us as if we'd won the World Series and took us out for ice cream and celebration.

About thirty-five years later, I joined a gay softball team that was somewhat delusional about their playing abilities and was in the wrong division, which meant over the course of two years we also lost every game, but tied one, which we also treated like the winning 7th game of the World Series.

The second time around, however, it wasn't painful, it felt holy. In the process I made a few lifelong friends and found a partner. Life has all kinds of weird lessons.

[Kevin Wolf]

The opposing coach oughta be ashamed of himself. All the moreso because he isn't ashamed.

[Bill Altreuter]

Prepare for years more of this sort of thing, Lance. It's worse when the poor sportsmanship comes from the parents of the the kids that play on your kid's team, which is what I witnessed last weekend when I went with my duaghter's rugby team to a tournament. It was far from universal, and to their credit most of the kids recognized this as embarassing behavior, but there were way too many parents who had way too much emotional investment in their kids' game. I would have thought that this would correlate with a paucity of sporting experience on the part of the parents, but I can't say that my research on this question is anything but preliminary.

I'd say the solution is to encourage proper sporting behavior in one's own child, then watch as the culture spreds. Sportsmanship spreads laterally from what I've seen.

[Grotesqueticle]

Went through the same thing. First year of tackle football, my team went 0-10-1. And we didn't have a legitimate excuse like being undersized, we just weren't that good, bless us. And like those above, we treated the tie like a huge victory. This was over 30 years ago, and there were a-hole parents then, and always will be.

But, your kid knows his dad ain't one. That's better than a win any day.