soccer
Soccer
Today I got to watch E play soccer for CESA (Carolina Elite Soccer Academy) for the first time. His first game was a couple of weeks ago, but L and I were in Knoxville for a volleyball tournament. Last week’s game got rained out, so this was the first time I got to watch him play.
In the first half, he played for about half the time as a defensive player. He was a little less aggressive than some of the other boys, but he soon gained some confidence and went after the ball.
In the second half, the coach put him in as an offensive player. He had one break and pulled back for some odd reason, turning to look (or so it seemed to me) to see if he had any backup. But he was alone, and ahead of all the defenders.
I meant to talk to him about what happened, but we never did.
Dalton 2021 Day 1
It’s a different tournament this year. There are fewer courts this year: five instead of eight. This means fewer teams in the building, so fewer players, fewer parents — reduced risk, in short.
They won their first two games in straight sets. They didn’t have much problem with either team.
As often happens, though, the third team was a different story. Our girls (and single boy — long story) lost the first set something like 25-22. Not a devastating loss, but a loss nonetheless.
They started the second set strong and before we knew it, our team was up 19-12. “Surely this is a done deal.” Nope. They ended up losing 26-24, which means in the second half of the game, they were consistently outscored 2-1.
It’s a question of experience, of gelling together as a team. It’s only their second tournament, and many of the points they lost were from silly, unforced errors. They’ll weed those out with time, with some experience.
And the Boy got his soccer uniform for the spring season.
Tuesday Playing
K and the Boy spent some time rolling around the neighborhood this evening after dinner. One of the countless things I love about K is her own love of childhood joys.
She was on E’s scooter, having the time of her life it appeared.
Afterward, we played a bit of soccer.
The Girl was at volleyball practice, so we had to do something to entertain ourselves.
And of course, we had to have a little down time once it was all said and done.
Family Sports
“Can we play some family sports tonight?” the Boy asked during dinner. He’s always interested in doing something as a family: a family bike ride, a family film, a game of family soccer. But our busy lives (busy even in this time of pandemic) being what they are, it’s rare that we get to play together. Tonight, for example, K had to write an offer on a house for one of her clients, and that takes a fair amount of time. So I went out with the kids and the dog and played some soccer and volleyball with them.
Tonight, the Boy learned a lesson during the game. He’d been bragging to L, insisting that he was a much better soccer player than she. Had the Boy developed fully the critical thinking skills a thirteen-year-old has, he would have looked at relative size, relative experience, and relative speed and thought, “It’s unlikely I’m much better than she.”
Then again, I’ve had plenty of thirteen-year-olds challenge me to chess, swear their going to beat me badly, and then ask as soon as the board is set up, “So, how do you play?” that a thirteen-year-old’s critical thinking skills can be less than ideal.
So they played. E lost. E fussed. I encouraged. And in the end, instead of giving up, he kept trying, kept attacking, and made some really good plays in the end.
Day 42: The Sermon and the Wall
The Sermon
I went out for a walk this morning. It was sunny and warm, and everyone else was busy doing something, so I couldn’t resist. Listening to The Brothers Karamazov as I walked, I heard an amplified voice over the reader’s voice. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, we hear the announcer at the local high school’s football games. Of course, there are no such games now, and there wouldn’t be any on a Sunday anyway. I paused the recording, stopped walking, and listened carefully. It took a moment, but I realized that it was a preacher delivering a Sunday morning message to the faithful as they sat in their cars. Drive-in church service.
As I walked a little further, I heard a little later furious honking coming from that direction, as if twenty or thirty cars were all randomly honking their horns. I took the earbuds out again and listened for some time.
Through the trees, I heard, “But we don’t have to fear death! Christ Jesus has conquered death!” Fairly typical evangelical formulation. “Isn’t that wonderful?” And then the horns began again, and I realized what was going on.
“They’re honking their amens,” I muttered to myself.
The Wall
The kids have taken the back corner of the house as their practice area: the Boy kicks his soccer ball against the wall; the Girl uses it for volleyball. They decided to use chalk to make some targets to practice accuracy.
The Girl had it all planned out. Colors, target shapes, everything. And then the Boy “messed it all up,” using colors at random for no other reason than wanting to use that particular color. And so they cleaned it and began again.
Final Soccer Game
Loss
The Boy was the goalie when it happened — the break, through the pack that always orbits the ball, past the last defenders who have spent most of the year looking on, that left the Boy basically one-on-one with the attacker.
From the moment the break started, I fear for the worst. And a few short seconds later, there it was. The first goal of the game. The only goal of the game. The team’s first loss. With E manning the goal.
I knew he would be distraught about it. “I’m no good at defense,” he declared.
The question is, will this affect his love for the game? Can we help him move past it? How long will this bother him? These were the thoughts I rehearsed on the way back to the house.
By the time we got home, there was no real mention of it. No mention of it for the rest of the day. But what about Tuesday, when it’s time to go to soccer practice?
October Saturday
It was finally fall today: temperatures never rose into the sixties, which meant that today was literally thirty degrees — thirty degrees — cooler than yesterday. This made the soccer game much more manageable, for players and spectators alike.
He had a couple of breaks, and one looked like it would have been a sure goal: the only defender was in front of him, running, not watching E at all.
“And then my foot touched the top of the ball instead of dribbling,” he explained later, “and I just fell.”
Later, he made it through three defenders and slipped the ball just past the goalie. He fell on the easy shot, made a goal on the tough one. Sounds like something I would do.
Soccer and Painting
Morning: the Boy’s team played its second game. Last week, they won 8-0. This week, there was a stronger team on the other end of the field. We won 2-0, and the Boy got one of the two goals: the goalie didn’t pick up the ball, and the Boy took advantage of the mistake.
In the afternoon, we worked to do a little painting around Papa’s new addition.
A good Saturday, overall.
Tuesday
After all day at school yesterday, I was not all that eager to head back this morning. I left yesterday morning at 7:15 in the morning; I returned home at 8:00 in the evening. At 7:15 I was leaving again. “I feel like it should be Wednesday, ” K, who had just as long a day, said this morning as I art the tea to steep and she prepared everyone’s lunch. “More like Thursday,” I thought.
The day as almost always flew by. With my planning periods at the start of the day, my five classes pop by one after the other. Soon I’m picking up the Boy, and then we’re off to soccer practice.
In a way, there’s nothing special about the day. The trick to a life well-loved is to find the special in such tiring days.
Winning, Losing, and Soccer Practice
The Boy headed over to his young soccer team with a nonchalant gait that suggested ambivalence.
“Run, E,” I said. “Show some enthusiasm.”
He broke into his power stride: he slams his feet down in short strides and rocks his whole upper body back and forth. It’s not a particularly efficient gait, and I’ve tried several times to help him improve it.
“Slamming your feet down quickly doesn’t help you run faster,” I once explained. “In fact, it really has the opposite effect.” We practied a better step together, but anytime he wants really to run, he reverts back to his jerky, stomping gait.
I suppose his thinking is logical in a way: to run full speed, you have to put all your energy into your run. What more obvious way is there of accomplishing this than expending massive amounts of energy in slamming your feet down?
So he was running across the field toward the circle of players while I retrieved my folding chair from the trunk. I closed it, looked up, and saw E sprawled on the ground, his arms out at his side, his feet still traveling upward as he rocked ever so slightly onto his upper body from the momentum of the running and falling.
I sighed.
The Boy has such a time with his self-confidence. He’s keenly aware that he’s slower than a lot of his peers; he’s quite cogniscient of the fact that he’s far from the most aggressive player on the soccer field; he knows he doesn’t play any number of sports as well as his friends. The only thing he feels truly comfortable and confident doing is riding his bike with me.
I couldn’t tell what happened in the end. He just got up and continued over to the group, but I don’t know if anyone said anything, but I don’t think that’s even necessary: we’re perfectly capable of feeling we’ve made a fool of ourselves without anyone saying a word.
The question was, should I say something?
There was a part of me that wanted to talk to him, wanted to reassure him, wanted to make sure he was okay, that his ego hadn’t taken too big of a hit. Yet there was another part that felt I should just let it go. Bringing it up later might not do anything positive, I thought.
In the end, I just let it go. He never said anything about it, and it seemed like the coach was giving him a little extra dose of praise later — perhaps thinking the same thing I was and trying to give that confidence a little boost? I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him about it either.
It’s that fine line — when to step in and when to back off — that I suppose every parent tries to find in every situation.
When we got back home, the Girl was asleep: she’d just finished a volleyball game and had been fighting a sniffle for most of the day. “Just let her sleep a while,” K said, and so we did.
“How was the game?” I asked.
It turned out that L’s team didn’t just beat the other team; they completely demolished them. “I’m not sure the other team had a total of 25 points in both sets combined,” K said sympathetically.
The coach of the other team had come out and told the audience that they were a young and inexperienced team. “Please give them all the support you can,” she said.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. In a way, that’s like saying, “We know we’re about to get our asses handed to us, but cheer for them anyway.” It’s a tacit admission of what’s about to happen. And yet what’s wrong with that? Isn’t that really just knowing one’s own limitations?
In my own brief coaching career, I got reprimanded by a parent when, after a player on our team, watching the other team warm-up, declared, “We’re going to lose! There’s no doubt,” I replied with, “Yes, you certainly are.” Dramatic pause. “If that’s how you see it, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.” I continued by pointing out that they’d given up before they even started, and nothing good ever comes of that.
“Well, I think you could have been more encouraging,” the mother said.
Perhaps. By that time, the girls had lost not only every single match but every single set. We won one set the entire year and lost every single match. I’d been trying to encourage them, but I suppose it wasn’t enough — not for the girls, not for this particular mother, not for any of them.
It was my one and only season of volleyball coaching. Fortunately, I have a lot more seasons of parenting to get it right.
The Day After
Normal is a relative thing. We are constantly, it seems, redefining and adjusting our normal. Most of those adjustments are relatively small; throughout our lives, we, at least a handful of times, have to reorient our lives in ways that are inconceivable until we’re living through them.
We’re all going through the latter now, dealing with Nana’s passing and all the changes that come with that.
We go through things for the first time, like sitting in a mortuary discussing options, choosing things we’d never really considered, like which urn, how many death certificates, which guest book.
We write things we’d never written, which sometimes break rules we’d always followed — an obituary is absolutely filled with passive voice: “She is survived by…” “She was preceded by…” “She is remembered by…”
We have conversations we’d never had, like discussions about what songs we might like at a memorial, when to have a final moment with someone, when to have a memorial.
And yet in the midst of all these experiences we’d never want to have, little changes sparkle with joy. Papa steadfastly stayed by Nana’s side for the last several years as her condition worsened, giving up church, giving up concerts, soccer games, and other things because he refused to leave her side. Now, with the thought that Nana’s most basic wish would be that he get out and live, those things are happening. Sitting around the small fire as the Boy makes smores; going to a small, end-of-the-year award ceremony; sitting on the back deck with me, sipping some scotch and reveling in fond memories.
We begin to catch our breath and move on. It is, after all, what Nana would want.
Digging, Mowing, Sealing
We put the new bed in a year ago — exactly a year ago today.
End of Spring 2018 Soccer
It’s tempting to fall into the obvious reflection: the “so much has changed in a year” cliché. A lot has changed in a year, but the majority of it has changed in the last five months, all starting December 4 with a phone call at around 9:30 in the evening while I was out walking the dog. “Nana is going to the hospital.” And from that moment, it all changed. No one knew just how much it would change, of course. No one has any real clairvoyance in medical emergencies. But here I am, a day past five months after it all started, exactly a year after we put them in, taking out the last vestiges of a garden.
It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then, Saturday work spills into Sunday. We try to keep Sunday as a day for the family, but with the last five months begin what they have, that in itself is a challenge.
Today’s job was simple but critical: deal with the recently created drainage issue at the front corner downspout.
Visions of it seeping through the brick into the now newly created concrete-slab crawl that would offer no outlet at all haunted me, and when the rain woke me at three in the morning, I went to check and found the hack I’d created didn’t work either and set about digging, in a downpour in my underwear and Crocs at three in the morning, a quick trench to direct the water away from the house.
Today, then, was the day to solve the problem once and for all. The first task: dig up the Crepe Myrtle at the corner of the house. That took a couple of hours. Then, the trenching, including a trench under the newly built ramp. Why not do it before they built the ramp? Simply — I didn’t know it would be necessary.
For now, everything is simply laid out and pushed together. I’m far from done and not even sure how I’ll terminate it for effective discharge.
Next, after several hours of digging, I turned my attention back to the yard and the hedges three-quarters trimmed. I’d cut my power cord yesterday and decided to put it off until Sunday — and the torrents of rain that were by then falling didn’t do much to avoid said procrastination.
The Boy for his part was upset and thrilled about it all. Digging is one of his favorite things, and he was disappointed that he missed out on so much of it. Mowing, though, is equally enjoyable for him, and he reached a milestone today: he can now start the mower himself. He ran over the trimmings that remained around the yard, always looking for a reason to turn the mower’s engine off so he could turn it back on.
(The hard rain really did a number on our plants — they’re beaten into submission.)
The final task was indoors: sealing up the entry to the new room. The floor guys are going to be here tomorrow, and the thought of sawdust throughout the kitchen and living room was none too appealing.
Finally, dinner without the girls: leftover soup and a salad. The Boy, being the wonderfully odd eater than he is, was disappointed with the soup (he’s grown tired of all soups, I think) and thrilled about the salad.
Soccer Sunday
This afternoon we had the annual kids/parents soccer game to wrap up another season of soccer.
“Are you going to play?” the Boy asked.
“Of course!” Though “playing” might be somewhat hyperbolic. I have no skills to speak of, and I have no fitness to make up for it either. But I did play at the game.
I learned two things: first, I’m terribly out of shape. Since K has been staying with Nana and Papa to take care of them (alternating weeks since February, then about four or five weeks ago, every week), I don’t get out to exercise that much. I use the excuse of not wanting to leave the kids in the house alone, but that’s really just an excuse, I think.
The second was something that followed off of the first: when you’re in such bad shape and have no skills, if you’re playing kids, you can pass it off by playing like all the other parents did when we were up X-0 (can’t remember the actual score): just letting the kids win…
Afterward, off to Nana’s and Papa’s for dinner. There won’t be too many more times that we do that, though. The addition is nearing completion. “Two more weeks,” we say, but we’ve been saying that for a month already. But still, we only have a few more times.
After dinner, we had a little boys’ time, as E called it. We decided to do our normal exploring around the drainage basin at the northeastern corner of Nana’s and Papa’s development’s property. It was a little overgrown as spring takes hold, but nothing like I was expecting. Perhaps the last time we go there? Who knows.
Last Saturday Soccer
A brilliant morning — sunlight everywhere.
Last soccer game of the year. The Boy was excited about it — not because he was excited to play, but because he was excited to be done.
“Do I have to go?” has become something of a refrain before soccer practice and before games.
“You committed to it,” I always explain, “so you’re going to see it through to the end. We keep our word; we finish what we start.”
When I watch his play, I understand why he’s not crazy about soccer: he’s among the youngest in his age group, and he’s lacking some of the confidence that other players on his team have. He prefers playing defense for this reason: all he has to do is stop someone, which means just kicking the ball away from them (in his mind). That’s easier than attacking, when two or three are on you trying to get the ball from you — not to mention your team mates who, despite calls from the coach to realize that they’re “same team!” and instructions to “spread out,” are swarming all around you as well.
So after today, a break. Until L’s volleyball season starts up again…
0-0 Tie
Saturday Growth
The day began with a bit of unusual work: pulling old wiring out of the attic. At first, the plan was just to remove them from the area over the old carport. But when in the afternoon I began the second part of today’s tasks — adding insulation to the lower part of the house — I realized I could pull almost all the wiring out — just about the whole length of the house. It was a relic from the past: old 10-gauge wiring used for long-removed baseboard heaters.
We took a break around lunchtime for E’s first game of the season. Emil had his first break of the spring season in the second quarter. (Youth soccer is divided into quarters.) He beat the last defender, sent his shot past the goalie toward the far corner, and would have made a goal but for a few inches.
Afterward, it was back into the attic for me. In the end, I put in several bags of insulation and took out one full contractor back of wiring.
Saturday
The Boy and I began the day early for a Saturday. My alarm went off at 6:15 but I snoozed it until 6:30 — that was really the plan when I went to bed last night, I must admit — and we both go up and had breakfast and cartoons (Tom and Jerry) before heading off to Clemson University for the annual Clemson Day for South Carolina Scouts.
It’s supposed to be in the main stadium, which makes it a great draw for everyone, but this year, with the weather questionable, it took place in the football team’s indoor practice area. (You know a football program is bringing in a lot of money for the university when they have a couple of outdoor practice facilities and an indoor one to boot.) Clemson football, soccer, volleyball, and track athletes ran the kids through drills and games for three hours, with each rotation ending with an autograph session.
“Parents, please remember that the autograph time is only for the kids,” the announcer reminded everyone several times.
As I suspected, the Boy was not keen on participating at the beginning. He’d been excited about going when I first mentioned it many weeks ago, but the excitement had waned as the day itself approached, and he suggested that he might just stay with me on the sideline and watch.
I tied gently encouraging him, but he wouldn’t budge. Finally, I went nuclear: “Buddy, I didn’t get up at 6:15 on a Saturday to sit with you on the sidelines.” Once he got out there, he was fine.
In the afternoon, a little exploring.
Last Game and Pinewood Derby
The Boy played his last game of his first basketball season today. He didn’t make a basket, though he took a shot. He had a couple of turnovers. At one point, he was defending his assigned player even though his team was on offense. All signs of a new player still finding his way in a game that he really doesn’t fully understand. But he played with such heart. He did everything his coach told him (coaches at this level are allowed on the court, as soccer coaches at that age group are allowed on the field), and oblivious to the above facts, he enjoyed it, which is what counts most.
“I know what I’m saving up for,” he declared earlier this week. “A basketball goal for our house.” The only problem: we don’t really have a place to put a goal. But our neighbor has a small court set up on his driveway — we’ll have to find the time to go there more often, K and I decided.
In the early evening, we went for the Boy’s second pinewood derby. We’d been working on the car this week, and the Boy went into it with a lot of confidence. At the very least, he was sure, we would have the best-looking car. He’d decided on a humvee, which made for easy painting and it looked pretty good when it was all said and done: I did the cutting and some of the sanding; he did the painting and some of the sanding.
When the racing started, his car finished consistently in fourth place out of the six cars racing. That meant he wasn’t the fastest but wasn’t the slowest either. A more competitive spirit would equate those terms with “best” and “worst,” but I try not to look at it that way because I’m only somewhat competitive.
Sometimes I wonder, or rather fear, that his lack of competitiveness comes from a lack of confidence, that he feels he has no chance of winning anyway and so why not cut one’s losses and not appear to be terribly worried about the results of inherently competitive events. That’s how I was, I think, when I was a child and teen. It wasn’t that I worried about losing; I just didn’t want to get embarrassed, to get beaten into the ground, so to speak. In gym class during high school, when we had basketball, I was reticent to participate because I was never all that good. I even refused to dress out some days, making the excuse that because I was on the swim team and got plenty of exercise that way, I really didn’t even need the activity. Swimming was different, though, because I had success in the pool and felt more confident there.
Is that compensation or something more concerning? I don’t really know, and I’m honestly not terribly worried about it. I think in the end, all of us with a little competitive spirit in us do that.