The Boy’s soccer team won 2-1 with a literal last-minute goal.
The Girl’s volleyball team won all three of their games in straight sets.
A good day in sports for our family.
Successful Saturday
soccer
Boys’ Saturday
We started with an early soccer game — 8:15. On the way there, we drove by his school at just about the time he’d be arriving for a normal school day.
Somehow, the boys lost their second consecutive game. I say “somehow” because for 90% of the game, they dominated. They kept the ball in their opponents’ half of the field, and I’d say they had at least 25 shots on goal. Their opponents maybe had 6-8 shots on goal — but one of them went in. That’s the only difference, but that’s the most important difference.
After the game, a little relaxation for the Boy, with a quote from a favorite movie of mine — modified, somewhat.
Late morning was honey-do list time — including getting some final details set for K’s new workstation.
I’m not jealous of her computer, but I’m envious of that desk!
Afternoon — bike ride. What else?
Hot dogs for dinner — the Boy on the grill.
Soccer Practice
It’s that time of year that includes “spring” in many things in the South (like “spring soccer season”) yet has weather most assuredly not-spring-like. We arrived at soccer practice at 6:30, and it was 54 degrees. By the time we left ninety minutes later, the temperature had dropped 11 degrees.
“My big toe is numb!” the Boy declared.
Spring 2022 Season Opener
We’re on a new team this year.
We were hoping for a change for how things went last season (i.e., not winning a single game and drawing only once).
Sadly, it was more of the same: 0-2.
New Soccer Season
The sprint soccer season has begun — first practice was tonight. E is with a new team and a new coach. We’re playing on fields only 5 minutes away from our house rather than 20 minutes away.
E’s first impression: “The coach is good. And the kids are nice to me.”
I also had a good impression from what one of the parents said. Here’s hoping this season will be better than the last, which was not terrible, but certainly had some drawbacks.
Final Game
Finals
It’s nearly the end of the fall soccer season: we’re in the final week of practice before the final game on Saturday. It’s been a tough season: no wins except through forfeit (does that even count?) and only one tie (last week thanks to E’s hat-trick). There’s been a little tension within the team as a result of it all. One boy, arguably the strongest player on the team, started taking things into his own hands (or rather, feet) and trying to be a one-boy show at times, not passing or even appearing to be aware of the other players. This frustrated some boys and comforted some boys: as long as he had it, things rose or fall on his shoulders. A win would be due to him, but a loss could also be attributed to him. Perhaps they didn’t think that, but I’ve no doubt it was at least an unconscious relief for some when it was A that was losing the ball in a move that ultimately ended in an opposing team’s goal rather than their “screw-up.” But now A has been out for a few weeks due to injury, so the boys have had to gel without him. As a result, there’s been better team play, and now that everything has gelled to some degree, it’s almost over.
That’s a fairly frequent pattern in life, though: as soon as everyone gets used to the year’s teachers, for instance, and everything is clicking seamlessly, the year ends. This is even more the case in block scheduling, like at L’s high school, where classes meet for 90 minutes a day but only for one semester. By the time everyone really knows how the class works and has found their place in it, the class is over.
In the repetitions of the seasons and holidays, it’s the same. As soon as we’re comfortable in the hustle of the Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s quartet, it’s over and we’re all exhausted from it.
“In my beginning is my end,” wrote TS Eliot
Hero
We all dream of being a hero. We can say we don’t, but we all have those little fantasies that at least once, we save the day. E is no exception, and for that reason, this fall’s soccer season has been disappointing for him. It’s not that he hasn’t felt like a hero; he has positively felt like he’s added very little to his team. In one game, an attacker beat him when he was a defender to score the first goal of the game, and I could see from his expression afterward that he felt horrible about it.
It certainly doesn’t help that his team has won only one game this season, and that was only by forfeit because the other team didn’t know about the game time change somehow and no one showed up. They’ve been beaten and they’ve been positively trounced.
“We’re never going to win,” has been the Boy’s refrain as we head back to the car. The other boys feel the same, I think.
Last week, for example, while we were camping, only five of the players showed up. They played anyway, and the asshole coach of the opposing team played all seven positions against our five boys, so the poor boys got beaten, though not as badly as one might expect (7-4).
Today, too, we were shorthanded, but a boy from the other team joined our team, and we played at even strength. (That coach showed class unlike the classless individual from last week.) We began relatively unremarkably, with neither team really dominating. Then, about ten minutes into the first half, E broke free with the ball and headed straight to the goal, firing a rocket that went right by the goalie and sank into the back corner of the net.
“E just scored!!!!!!!!!!” I texted K with probably the biggest grin smeared across my face. Last season, his first with CESA (the local soccer league), he hadn’t scored a single goal all season.
By the end of the first half the red team had equalized and then pulled ahead, so we went into break under a bit of pressure.
“I was sure we were going to lose,” E explained later. When red scored a third time, E was convinced that they were going to experience their next inevitable loss. But shortly after that, the Boy broke through the defenses again and scored his second goal, pulling his team to within one. Just a few minutes after that, he was through again, but he stumbled a bit and sent the ball well wide of the goal.
“How amazing that would have been!” I thought.
Just moments later, the Boy broke through, outran two defenders, and shot a lovely looping curve into the net. Three goals in one game — a coveted hat-trick. To top it all off, I finally had my camera up while he scored — in the other two, I’d dropped it to my side and just cheered him on, but the final one, I kept firing away.
But of all the shots from today, my favorite is the one just after his first goal when he’d just gotten a big congratulatory low-five from a teammate. Head slightly down, a little spring in his step, he walked back to his position. I look at the image and wonder what exactly he was thinking, wonder just how much it might help his confidence, wonder if it might not be the best thing that’s happened to him in ages.
Football Glory and Critical Thinking
When we lived in Asheville, I worked for one year at a day treatment facility for kids who’d been expelled from alternative school. It was a tough bunch of mainly fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. At one point, though, two boys who’d known each other “on the outside” (as they’d referred to it) were in the program at the same time. At lunch they’d revel in their former football glory, recalling magnificent plays they’d been a part of and sharing in the sorrow of those losses that had stung so badly. At one point, one of the boys mentioned having a recording of one of those games.
“Really!?” The program director was incredulous, but he managed to talk the boy into bringing in the video.
A couple of days later, during afternoon free time, the kid put the video cassette into the VHS player and pressed play. Soon, the director was howling in laughter as he watched a little league game in full chaotic, cute glory.
“Man, I thought you were talking about games you’d played in middle school or something,” he laughed. “I didn’t realize you were talking about second grade!” He was just good-naturedly ribbing the kids, and they took it fairly well.
Looking back on it this evening as I jogged laps in a parking lot while the Boy had soccer practice, it suddenly took on a newly instructive dimension for me. Had any of us really thought about it, we would have known it could not have been middle school football the boys were talking about. They’d experienced little success in middle school, showing out enough to be removed from the setting altogether. Even the most gifted player is going to have to meet certain standards — administrators might bend some requirements for such a boy, but there are at least some requirements. These boys couldn’t even make it through alternative school let alone the less structured setting of a typical middle school classroom, so there was no way we adults should have assumed they were talking about playing organized football in the last several years.
We made those assumptions, though, because they neatly and immediately fit our assumptions. When a fourteen-year-old boy is reveling in past glory, we don’t expect it to be from early elementary school but from the recent past. It’s an immediate and logical assumption that we make without even being aware that we’ve made such an assumption. The thing is, we make these kinds of assumptions constantly throughout the day. We couldn’t function, I’d argue, if we were to give extended critical thought to each and every decision we make and every thought that flits through our mind. The trick is being aware enough of our thoughts to have as a conscious option the ability to switch on our critical thinking and go, “Now, hold on there.”
It’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching literature to middle schoolers. It’s just those “Now, hold on there” moments that critical reading encourages.
Monday Night Moon
After desert, when K pretended she was about to eat E’s while he ran inside for a moment, we went to the front yard to get a little family exercise. L, having stayed home today because of sinus issues, passed the volleyball to me. Later, the Boy and I worked on his defensive skills in soccer.
As the Girl and I played, I noticed that, over her shoulder, the waxing moon was almost a half-moon. A waxing moon in the autumn was always a harbinger of the greatest week of the year, hands down, year after year. It was in the fall that our heterodox sect took a week off of work and school to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles in a strange attempt to follow the pattern of Old Testament holy days that we were taught were still required.
When I was L’s age, the sight of such a moon in September would edge me toward near-giddiness as I thought about all the adventures that awaited after the obligatory, daily, and often boring church service (yes, daily church — a two-hour service, no less, with a sermon that lasted anywhere from sixty to ninety ass- and mind-numbing minutes). Surely I’d meet new friends. Maybe we’d see some great attractions. But most enticing was the promise of what everyone called a feast-fling: a week-long adolescent romance that ended with addresses and phone numbers exchanged along with promises and more promises, a romance that was lucky to reach Christmas break. “Maybe we’ll go to the same feast site next year!” was the excitement.
It never worked, of course, because adolescent romances are just that — flings. But that excitement along with the excitement of all the other amazing experiences we’d certainly have hung in the glow around waxing autumnal moons.
My children know none of these things. The specifics of my religious upbringing are a complete mystery to them. I’m content to let them assume what they will. I’ve hesitated to tell them anything about it because it doesn’t seem all that relevant to their lives, and quite honestly, I didn’t want to shade how they saw Nana and Papa. That of course assumes that it would color how they see them, which is likely a projection: through almost all of my adult life, I have looked at the beliefs they inculcated into me, beliefs they held with complete conviction but were without a shred of logic even within a strictly Christian theological context, and wondered how in the world they could have fallen for such silliness. I know they came to view their own beliefs similarly, returning eventually to a more orthodox Protestant faith, but somehow I still hesitated.
“I hesitated,” I say as if it’s something that’s occupied a large part of my conscious thoughts. In truth, it has, but only in a theoretical, theological sense. My thoughts have only turned to that theology while mowing or having a cigar and scotch on a Saturday night. Unless I happen to see a waxing autumnal moon…
Return from the Long Weekend
We returned to school to find 18 teachers out today due to covid. That’s not 18 positive cases — just 18 teachers affected in one way or another. Quarantined due to exposure. Staying home because of a child being quarantined due to exposure. Staying home because a child’s daycare has closed due to excessive covid cases.
“Why don’t we call the governor to see if he would like to come and cover some of these teachers who are out,” I suggested to another teacher as we stood, sensibly distanced and masked, making copies and preparing materials in the teacher workroom.
Meanwhile, the kids came and went in a variety of styles: no masks, masks worn down on the chin, masks worn properly, and various transitional states between the three. I carried on, masked all day, conscientiously distanced from everyone, teaching English I Honors kids how to parse some crazy Poe sentences.
After school and dinner, the Boy and I headed across town for soccer practice.
At last — a fairly safe activity in these uncertain times. And after practice, I was pleased to see the Boy making a conscious effort to distance himself.
How long will these habits last? Will E still be pulling back from huddled groups ten years from now? Will it become a reflex? Some on the right would bemoan how this somehow scars them. Maybe, but I can think of worse scarring.
Soccer Fall 2021
Down the Drain
We’ve played soccer in the front yard for countless hours. We’ve fired innumerable shots into our neighbors’ yards. We’ve retrieved every single ball, no matter where it’s gone. Until tonight. L’s shot went wide, sailed into the neighbors’ yard, rolled down the ditch, passed into the culvert, and disappeared, for his culvert doesn’t just pass under his driveway: it empties into a basin with another culvert and the drains into the creek behind our house. That basin is covered with an enormous concrete cover that we could not possibly move to retrieve the ball, so chances are, it’s gone.
That wouldn’t have been a big deal if it had been his old, beat-up, scratched, and scared ball. The ball we’ve kicked into the same neighbors’ yard countless times. But this was his new ball. His birthday gift ball. Which he got only on Friday.
He’s heartbroken about it.
Nine
Today, the Boy turned nine. It’s his last year in single digits, and we’re all wondering how we got to this point so quickly. That’s the same old story every birthday, though.
This year, most of the gifts from us are soccer-based: a new ball and new nets. He and the Girl tried them out after dinner.
Previous Years
Happy Mess Day
Second Time Around
Third Party
Celebration Day
Birthday
Fifth Birthday Party
Sports and Ice Cream
Seventh Birthday
Tournament Weekend
Both the kids had tournaments this weekend. The Girl’s tournament was outside Atlanta, and it was her first time in competitive sand volleyball.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“I got sand in my mouth,” was the first impression.
The Boy’s tournament was local. They made it to the semifinals then lost.
“We should have won” was the sentiment. How to get him to accept “win some, lose some” and still have the fire in the belly?
Team Picture
Final Practice
Cool Spring Thursday
We’re nearing the end-of-year testing that will measure students against a static, inflexible standard. Growth doesn’t matter as much as a set level of proficiency. It’s always been a frustration to me that the American education system fixates on proficiency instead of growth. If a student improves his reading level by three grades in one year but still is performing below the eighth-grade level, that is somehow counted as a failure when it’s anything but.
One of the hallmarks of the end of the year is the scramble we’re all making to cover last-minute items. For example, I’d neglected the active/passive distinction, so I’m hurriedly going over it with students, along with verb mood.
“Why are we learning this?” one might ask.
“Because it’s on the test,” is the tempting answer.
In the evening, soccer practice. E made the winning shot on a game the kids were playing and his teammates mob him. It’s a good way to end the day.
The Day After Easter
A bit of relaxation in the morning.
A little exploration in the afternoon.
A little soccer in the evening.
Spring Monday
