Phthursday Musings: The Season of Green Goblins

I am a soccer coach.

My team is a gaggle of ten 7-8 year old boys who named themselves the Green Goblins.

We are so named because our uniforms are green. Green and white, to be precise. Vertical stripes. The same classic kit as the Spanish team Real Betis, the Hungarian team Ferencvaros, and, to our own familial amusement, the Irish team Bray Wanderers. Like this:

We’ve played six games, with the seventh and final game of the fall season coming up this Saturday. We’ve won one, lost five.

Am I a good soccer coach? Who knows? I’m clearly not as diligent about instilling things like warmup routines. I’m clearly not as hardcore about certain kinds of drills. Some of the other teams we’ve played have clearly gotten more coaching. But is it better?

I worry about it a little… but just a little. Because, to me, superior coaching is a plus but not the point. The main point of this whole crazy endeavor is for these kids to run around and hopefully have fun doing so. Yeah, winning is more fun than losing. But on average, over time, you’re going to win less than half the time. You’ve got to find the fun in just playing. And, I think, I’m more interested in them finding the fun than in finding their skills. Their skills matter, but the fun matters more. They’re kids.

One of the things I debated is whether or not to try and get kids this age to run set pieces. If you’re unfamiliar with soccer, a “set piece” in soccer is a lot like a set out of bounds play in basketball, or maybe every play in football. The idea is that everyone on the field has a role at a given point in time.

During our first game, I observed that when we had a corner kick or a kick-in from near the corner, nobody really knew where to go. We’d only had one practice, and that practice was primarily just trying to learn names. I thought, well, maybe we can try a single set piece. What could go wrong?

I thought about it, how to get kids to line up, how to give them something easy to remember, something repeatable.

This is Trapezoid:

We play six-on-six, with a goalie. Three boys are attackers, two are defenders.

In Trapezoid, the two defenders are stationed at the corners (elbows) of the large box. Two attackers are stationed at the corners of the small box, more or less at the near post and far post. The third attacker kicks the ball in from the corner, and his charge is to kick it right in front of the goal.

Imagine a team of boys manages to get a corner kick, and the result is that their coach yells out TRAPEZOID! TRAPEZOID!

Guess what? The boys listen. Mostly. The parents, I think, have been baffled by the crazy man shouting out obscure shapes, but that’s okay. I think a crazy word like Trapezoid is precisely the kind of fun word that a set piece should be named.

Now, does it work? Yes and no. We haven’t actually scored a goal off of the play. But we’ve come tantalizingly close a couple of times. Tantalizing Trapezoids.

It worked well enough that we added one more set piece. Not much of a set piece, exactly. This one is called Goblin Attack. It’s on an out-of-bounds kick further up the field, and the whole thing is just calling out GOBLIN ATTACK! and everybody runs up the field and the kick-in is boomed up the field. This one probably backfires more than it comes close, but gosh darn it, it’s more fun.

Every boy always wants to be the goalie. This is funny! I am quite sure that most professional goalies are psychopaths. Oh, we can joke, but really, the average 7-year old is not actually a psychopath. Just an aspiring one. Until, hopefully, he’s not.

We play 4 10-minute quarters. We rotate goalies every quarter. Not only that, but we rotate all positions every quarter. I am meticulous about this, keeping track of who has played what, because part of being fun is being fair. Yes, by “keeping track”, I mean that I have a spreadsheet:

See? Our best athlete? Our worst athlete? It doesn’t matter. Everyone gets to be goalie. Everyone gets to play the same amount. Everyone! Everyone!

Playing goalie at this age is less about position and technique, and more about not being afraid to do something. I have no idea how to coach this, without getting ample one-on-one instruction time with every boy, and even then… I mean, I’ve never been a goalie! But we try to send the kids out there and have them do well. We try to give them some instruction. But we are specifically told as coaches to let the kids play and to the extent that kids are going to get “correction” from me, I’m going to try to make it fun correction.

This last weekend, there was a play where the best action one of our players could have taken would have been to kick the ball as hard as he could. He had gotten to the ball first, two players from the other team were converging, and if he would have thumped the ball, it probably would have gone past both of them and gotten somewhere in the vicinity of the goal. Well, he got to the ball, and instead of thwacking it, he just kind of toed it.

At the end of that quarter, it was his turn to be out, and I took him aside, and said, next time you get to a ball like that… BLAST IT. I told him I didn’t care where the ball went, I didn’t care what happened afterwards. I just wanted him to go up to a ball, set up, and BLAST IT. You see, BLAST is an incredibly fun word. B is a big demonstrative consonant, enhanced by its partnership with L. Short A is one of those extendable sounds that sounds happy - not unlike the gleeful Long E, but most definitely unlike that old fretful schwa. You can extend the S just a little bit too, and then end with a very clean and definite T. It’s just a perfect word for its purposes.

Thankfully I have a coaching staff. There’s me, an assistant coach, and a hybrid assistant coach / referee.

My assistant is a mom instead of a dad. I’m very happy that it worked out this way, because I strongly believe that kids should have women as coaches.

I’ve read about this some. At the dawn of Title IX, when there started to be more girls’ teams, often they were coached by women. Over time, and especially at higher levels, old gender inequities crept back in. I played organized sports for several years, and I do not remember ever seeing a woman coaching boys above the T-ball level.

When you hear the word “Coach”, I’ll bet you immediately picture a man.

Now, around here at META-SPIEL, we usually try to keep a pleasant tone. So I want you to imagine this coming across as pleasantly as possible:

It is absolute fucking bullshit that the coaching ranks are so heavily male.

I get that it’s going to be especially hard for women to break through into the professional ranks of men’s sports. That is a topic I could go off about as well. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about kids and their coaches, all the way up through high school, even beyond.

The ideal of the coach as the hyper-competitive, hyper-masculine, screaming lunatic on the sidelines is such exquisite rubbish. Now it might very well be the case that some people like that are not only excellent coaches but fine people besides, and that style of coaching works well for some players. But most players, I believe, do not want nor need actual screaming lunatics on the sidelines!

I also want to be clear that I’m not trying to make some sort of backwards argument that the hyper-masculinity should be balanced out by femininity. What I’m saying is that kids need to see coaches and teachers and other authority figures who are all sorts of different people. I don’t think there should be any archetype for a coach, especially not at this age level. I think people are different, are going to have different approaches, and kids need to have robustly diverse experiences.

Tell me how many of you had experiences just like this: All the way up through the end of grade school, every single classroom teacher I had was a woman. (I did have a couple special subject male teachers, one each in art, gym, and Spanish.) Every single principal I had was a man. Every single coach I had was a man. Only three people across all of those categories were people of color.

I insist that we can do better.

And, so, I’m very pleased with our coaching staff. And as I spend more time around these soccer and baseball leagues I am going to advocate for more attention to having women as coaches - including as coaches of boys - because I want it to be something so ordinary that nobody thinks twice about it.

It helps a lot that I’ve got a staff that’s in tune that no 7-year old needs to be yelled at (unless he’s doing something inappropriate), that the whole reason these kids are out there is to have fun. It also helps that, at least to my ears, the parents all seem to feel the same way. I’ve heard horror stories and I’m very glad that I’m not living through one. Even if they are goblins.

Seeing these kids express themselves is a really fabulous experience. You see a lot of joy, a lot of frustration, a lot of quiet listening, a lot of what looks like quiet listening until you realize that they can be staring right at you nodding along and not actually processing an iota of what you’re saying.

This crop of kids really seems like a bunch of good ones. Oh, I’ve seen pushing and I’ve seen mean things be said and I’ve seen ill behavior. But I haven’t seen truly awful behavior. I haven’t seen mean kids.

I have this theory of longstanding that I once explained to my dad: Most bad things are done by good people. I think this applies even more so when you’re talking about kids. Because on the whole they’re good kids, and so when they do bad things, there’s an opportunity to correct, to redirect, to empower with better coping strategies. Bad doesn’t mean evil or atrocious. It only means what it means.

For some kids, a field or a court or a pitch or a diamond might be a place where they learn bad behavior. But I think those are all places where they can learn how to correct bad behavior. They can learn good sportsmanship, which off the field we might simply call grace. They can learn how to push themselves - but not to the point of insanity! - which off the field can help them find more confidence in a lot of other endeavors. They can learn that, win lose or draw, the game still ends with snacks. The competition is fun, now it’s over, get your weird weird Cheetos now, come back next week.

It might not be for all kids. But that’s for them to figure out. Our job is to help them on that journey of figuring things out. We are, of course, all on that journey, and sometimes, we have needed, and still need, more help than at other times. But it’s still our journeys.

This gets me to the phenomenon of coaching one’s own kid. I see three competing concepts:

1. The child is on their own journey

2. But the parent is still on their own journey; indeed, they are sharing portions of their journey

3. But the parent may also be living vicariously through the child’s journey

As I noted above, I’ve heard horror stories about how parents behave at games. I haven’t seen the worst of all that. But it’s not hard for me to imagine how a child’s journey just becomes a vicarious endeavor to the parent. And, sadly, I can also imagine something worse: the child’s journey being completely constricted by the parent who thinks it’s truly all about them.

The reason I’m coaching is because they needed coaches, and I reasoned that I was going to be out there anyway, I could do this. But even though I’m out there for my kid, and, also, for the other kids, I’m still on my own journey. Indeed this entire post should exude that. Far from this all being a problem, I think it’s very healthy to recognize the parallel nature of these journeys. It helps keep me more clear-eyed about how to treat my kid as close to the same as the others. It helps keep me more clear-eyed about what parts of the journey are truly his to figure out on his own and what parts are those he’s truly sharing with me.

The point isn’t that I or anyone else can get all this exactly right. Rather, it’s that thoughtfulness matters. A lot.

My kid might blossom into a tremendous athlete. But even if he does, he might not be ultra-competitive. Or, maybe, he’s ultimately just not that much of an athlete… and yet still ultra-competitive. I see it as important to be there for a lot of his journey, but not to control it or suffocate it. Yeah, sometimes, I’m Coach too, but mostly, I’m Dad, and, as should be obvious, I’m… this kind of Dad. (Thank you, Gary Larson & The Far Side.)

The same team reconvenes in the spring, some 5 months off. The fall closes this Saturday morning. The game time temperature might be a little better, but the field will have gone through two days of rain. I expect a cold, damp end to the fall season.

I could use a break. I’m exhausted. It’s not that the coaching has been difficult. I’m just exhausted generally. I am hopefully that by the time the spring season comes around, we are deep into the descent of the pandemic, and we are looking at things truly fully opening up again.

I think kids this age and younger may have been most successful of anyone at weathering the pandemic. They had less preconceived notion of annual rhythms, so it’s been less disruptive to them. They’re adaptable. They’re coachable. It’s better than a day job.

Even if they are goblins.