Not very sporting to fire on an unarmed opponent
me being both a jolly good sport and a poor sport while talking about sports
Well, it’s happened again. Something goes wrong, and suddenly people who didn’t give two craps beforehand are now up in arms, zealots for The Cause. You know what I’m talking about: the first Monday after Spring Forward Daylight Saving Time, the day when the scales finally fall from the eyes of people who have had their first child within the past 12 months. Suddenly your best friend starts texting infographics about why DST sucks and Abolish DST and you just roll your eyes and say, welcome to my life. I’ve had 14 years of this, buddy. Good luck being a changemaker.
In other news, we watched our first Charlotte FC soccer match last night, which was fun. Noah bought some merch for him and Oliver, our lil’ goalkeeper, but now after seeing the team, I want merch too. Specifically the goalie Kahlina merch. That dude, who has previously only played abroad (he’s Croatian), had a freaking amazing match AND his last name is my middle name! (Spelled differently. It’s Slavic in origin, meaning “flower.”) The last time Noah bought me merch was a Formula 1 Red Bull racerback tank top. So it follows I should be expecting a Charlotte FC string bikini in the mail any day now.
Sadly, despite scoring their first goal in their inaugural season, Charlotte lost by one in the NINETY-SIXTH MINUTE.
Still, seeing Kahlina save a scud missile off the foot of the league’s all-time greatest scorer, Josef Martinez, and then watching Martinez laugh and applaud the save, was well worth the viewing. In fact, here you go!
https://www.mlssoccer.com/video/save-kristijan-kahlina-charlotte-fc-81st-minute#save-kristijan-kahlina-charlotte-fc-81st-minute
That and how Noah kept deliberately mispronouncing Christian Fuchs’ last name made it an all-around Fun Time.
What was not a fun time was the last match Oliver played. This weekend’s games were rescheduled because of weather, but last weekend we drove for an hour to essentially watch him be a backboard against a well-organized, numerically superior team of kids who were nearly 2 years older than our team.
Oliver is always going to be young in his cohort, because they sort kids by birth year rather than schoolyear, and he was a December baby. So at least until puberty, he’s likely to also be among the smallest on his teams. Nevertheless, he is fearless as a goalie.
He had some amazing saves, but our guys literally never had any meaningful possession. They never got a shot, never mind a shot on goal. The only time the opposition’s goalie—who was a full head and shoulders taller than Oliver—touched the ball was on backward passes. Eventually, Oliver couldn’t hold them off any longer and we lost, big.
We’ve been frustrated this past year since the league we play in got a new Head Cheese. He’s bringing in a new philosophy that makes sense on paper but, at least up till now, appears to be unintentionally disadvantaging the kids who are smaller or less developed.
Despite my history as a known strongly-worded-letter writer—well actually because of it—I let Noah take the lead on emailing the director to present some of our concerns. If I had written the letter, it would’ve begun “First of all, screw you” and would’ve contained ALL our concerns, with citations and footnotes. Speaking of footnotes1
The guy wrote back with some general acknowledgments and based on the weekly email he sent out across the league, we weren’t the only Karens to ask for the manager. So we’ll see.
Youth sports are so freaking fraught, I think mainly because college athletics are so freaking fraught. Our kid is 9. We want to foster his love of playing while making sure he’s challenged. To give him the opportunity to excel if the kernel of talent is there. And if he doesn’t “get serious” until he’s a teen (and by “get serious” I mean play with coaches who are paid to be coaches, not just rec coaches where Any Dad fills in when Coach Tyler’s-Mom is out of town) he would be perhaps irreparably behind the curve. As someone who didn’t start taking dance until I was 13, my natural ability could only carry me so far against people who’d been dancing since they were 3.
We are by no means overinvolved or living vicariously. If Oliver didn’t want to play, we wouldn’t force him to, never mind keep him in a league that is frankly expensive. Well, it’s expensive for us, anyway. Maybe not for the Real Housewives of Pinehurst we sat next to at the ill-fated game, one of whom was chuckling about billable hours with her friend in Lululemon leggings. But that’s just me being ungenerous and reverse classist.2
So what’s the point? Why agonize over our 9-year-old’s one extracurricular? What’re we trying to get out of this? A college scholarship would be nice.
We’re all just trying to do the best for our kids. The Lululemon Housewife was talking about the debit card she got for her kid, for his own account, which she puts his allowance in for doing chores. I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with that. It’s great to teach kids money management and responsibility. But it’s hard not to feel like you’re on another planet when the folks around you are prominent neurosurgeons and lawyers and wearers of expensive athleisure attire who have enough money to pay their kids for housework.
If Oliver ever does happen to make it to the big leagues, you’ll be able to pick me out in the stands every time. I’ll be the one in the skanky team merch.
The abovementioned bestie/anti-DST activist is a teacher. One of his bright but misguided students began an essay on the topic of feudalism with the phrase “First of all, screw you,” proceeded with a pretty darn good explanation of feudalism, then wrapped up with the salutation “Burn in 1,000 hells.” I try to work these epistolary strokes of brilliance into all my correspondences now.
To be fair, Lululemon was nice enough and Lawyer was also eating her kid’s Cheez-it snack mix, so clearly she isn’t a total twit. No offense to any lawyers either. I’m looking at you, DanT.
Love the post.
I came up through rec-league baseball and had the weird birthday thing. One year, I'd be with my classmates and would barely get playing time because I was terrible and made humiliating errors when they stuck me in right field. The next year, my classmates would move up a level, and I'd be with the class behind me, a starting pitcher. Back and forth, year to year. If my goal had been to learn life lessons from the game (it wasn't), I couldn't have arranged it better.
When puberty kicked in, there was one year where I was a low-level pitcher on our high-school team *and also* the best pitcher in the entire rec. league. One game there was a new team, and all the boys were in their first year. I struck out every batter just throwing fast balls down the middle of the plate because I was bigger and stronger. (Puberty bulked me up almost to my adult size in one year)
I thought it was kinda interesting just to say I'd pitched a perfect game, but it wasn't fun. I knew that it was almost a mean thing to do and was glad when it ended.
But it never occurred to me not to play that year because, as always, I had paid for the right to be there the previous year.
You are such a fun writer. Great stuff.
The Gladwell parallel jumped out at me too. My boys are now past the age of league sports. Except for a short flirtation with Junior Hockey (a kind of feeder for NHL minor league teams) in between high school and college, the whole exercise had essentially no careerist benefit. It did have, on the other hand, an extravagant upside in terms of emotional and psychological development. That benefit extends to parents of goalies - lucky you! - since our kids sometimes literally win or lose games for their teams. (For advanced parental self-regulation of emotion see: ice-hockey-shootout-to-determine-tournament-winner. My knuckles are still white.)
All said, those miserable 11-0 games are as much a part of it as the amazing saved a shot with four seconds on the clock to get us in the playoffs games. At their best, youth sports can give kids a sense of themselves that they carry forever. Congrats on helping Oliver find something he connects to and wants to do.