Kick Started

This week, after two Saturdays of rain-outs, my son’s soccer team finally played its last game. It wasn’t a game at all, in point of fact. The opposing team didn’t bother to show up, so the valiant “Purple Snakes,” as my son and his teammates called themselves, played a scrimmage of jerseys versus skins. Only, at just over 40 degrees Fahrenheit last Saturday morning, there wasn’t actually a “skins” team either; it was more like a match between the jerseys and the long underwears. The underwears won, 3 to 2.

We pulled into Edwin Warner Park just before 10 o’clock in the morning, when the mist hadn’t yet completely burned off the desolate fields. We drove past trees almost wholly shed of their leaves and pulled up next to a few sport utility vehicles gathered at the end of the parking lot. Some of the team members were already warming up, kicking the ball around the brown grass. Most were not. Most were huddled inside their mothers’ stadium coats, miserably waiting to be told what to do. Far away, many fields over, two teams in the older league were playing pretty spiritedly for a handful of fans, but otherwise the whole soccer complex was empty. It was a disheartening sight. Even our 5-year-old picked up on the cosmic ennui: “Gosh, where is everybody?” he wondered. “It’s kind of like a graveyard out here.”

I have to admit, the atmosphere suited my mood. The colorless sky, the naked gray trees, the dry grass covering hard-packed soil—they were all in perfect harmony with my feeling for organized sports in general: The whole idea of the thing depresses me.

It’s not that I’m against the team mentality. God knows I’m no rugged individualist, striking out on my own, hang-gliding and mountain-biking my way to singular spiritual enlightenment. In fact, I rather like the team concept—people pulling together, using their wits and their stamina and their marvelous God-given bodies to achieve a single, ardent goal. It’s just the reality of the goal that troubles me. How can so many people genuinely, passionately care about whether a ball makes it into a net or a goal or a little hole in the ground? After all, even if a person—or a team—happens to win a championship, they still have to play the same people again next year. For the life of me, I just don’t get it.

I’m a sports agnostic. I don’t absolutely assert that other people’s burning belief in the meaning of triumph is unfounded; I simply don’t have that belief myself. I was not born with the gift of faith in a god of victory. Like an unbeliever at a tent revival, I look around at all the flushed and earnest faces, I hear the collective moans and chants and screams of transcendent joy, I feel the surge of straining bodies pressed close to each other and moving in accord, and to me they all look a little silly—or downright dangerous, depending on my mood.

I was never meant to be a soccer mom, but I settled for being one because to me soccer seems less dangerous than football, and I fear being a football mom more. Being an agnostic soccer mom is more a matter of inconvenience: giving up Saturdays for an entire season, making sure the jersey is clean on game day, figuring out when to feed a kid whose practice starts at 6 p.m. but whose bedtime is 7:30. (Eat at 5 and watch your kid throw up on the field? Wait until 7:30 when the kid is starving and exhausted and uncooperative and primed to employ dawdling tactics that delay bedtime until nearly 10?)

But being a football mom is a matter of life and death. During my first week of college at a major SEC school, a freshman football player collapsed on the practice field and died. No one hit him in the head or kicked him in the kidney or piled up on him and broke his neck. He was 18 years old and strong. He just played so hard in the hot, muggy weather that he died. I made a vow: No son of mine would ever play football.

So I tried to generate at least a little enthusiasm for this new phase of our lives when my son learned from a friend that he was already old enough—and had been for at least a year—to play soccer. I knew for a fact that my boy was more interested in acquiring a jersey and a medal than he was in playing the game, but my husband assured me it was all going to turn out all right in the end. Our son would learn teamwork, he would learn sportsmanship, he would learn to handle the ball in such a way that other boys wouldn’t laugh at him later in life. These, my husband insisted, were important skills that a child does not learn from collecting dead cicada skins in the backyard or watching a spider’s egg-sac hatch in the bathroom windowsill.