The Gender Agenda

My girlfriend Sonia has gotten herself into a bit of a situation. Her
kid ended up on a soccer team with a clueless dickhead of a coach who
insisted on playing a lame passing game and would bench Sonia’s
daughter anytime she picked up a yellow card for playing in our
traditional robust American style. So Sonia was forced to do what any
right thinking parent would do – she started flaming the guy with some
nice juicy posts on the local on-line soccer forum. Of course she’s
not stupid so she decided to use the name STRIKERSDAD which was
designed to protect her own anonymity and to drop the father of the
little bitch who plays up front on their team right in the shit.

Unfortunately her strategy wasn’t having much effect and so Sonia was
forced into a little bit of embellishment in her posts to the point
where the community now not only knows that knucklehead is a crap
coach, but they also suspect he might be a womanizing alcoholic who
knocks the kids around during practice. Gotta love the power of the
internet.

Anyway, that seemed to fire things up and her STRIKERSDAD account
started getting a bunch of private messages with more “facts” about
this coach. Sonia started to correspond regularly with some girl
called SOCCERMOMIO and before she knew what was happening they were
sharing all kinds of personal details that, to be honest, she wouldn’t
dream of saying in real life. She was actually getting quite attached
to this girl so, before it got out of hand, she confessed that she was
really a woman, whereupon SOCCERMOMIO confessed that she was really a
man and the two of them settled down into a pattern of deeply depraved
sexting which they told their spouses was all just on-line soccer
chat.

Nobody seemed to be getting hurt until the coach decided he had been
defamed and retained counsel to sue the website and force them to
reveal the names of the posters. The papers are likely to have field
day when they find out a respected coach has been branded a child
abuser by a married woman masquerading as a man in an adulterous
relationship with man masquerading as a woman in a kid’s soccer
community.

Poor Sonia is distraught and doesn’t know what to do! I hope things
work out for her because she’s such a nice person. At least, I think
she is a nice person but I’m not sure because I’ve only ever met her
on-line.

Brave New World

There was a time when it seemed to me that all I needed to do to turn out a superstar was to provide her with one of those crazy soccer balls on an elastic rope that you tie round your waist and kick for about 12 seconds before you realize it’s a complete waste of time and money. Then I moved on to one of those curvy bits of plastic that sends the ball back at you in different ways so you learn to control it, but I realized that my kid didn’t need that since there were already plenty of kids on her team that could send the ball off in totally random directions. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that until I’d already spent more money on the ‘kickback panel’ for my curvy bit of plastic – the modern equivalent of what we used to call a “wall” when I was a kid.

So anyway, I think that this time we really have the answer that the average American parent is looking for in the world of youth soccer: Genetic Engineering.

British Scientists (now there’s an oxymoron) have identified the URNUTz gene which is heavily prevalent in the world’s leading soccer players. My second husband had this gene in huge quantities and was convinced that he had passed it on to our son. Unfortunately he doesn’t know that he’s not the boy’s real father and that the kid actually inherited the XBX360 chromosome which turned him into a lazy fat ass that spends the whole day playing video games.

The leading edge now seems to be the Stockholm Syndrome in which soccer parents seem to start to sympathize with the fruit cakes who peddle this type of nonsense. This group has identified the SOCFUN gene which is inherited by every kid who just wants to play the game because they enjoy it. Thankfully these scientists are working hard on some way to eliminate this disturbing problem.

Here in the USA the approach seems to be less about genes and more about AMI (Average Median Income) theory. Research into this reveals that the higher the AMI the more likely it is that a kid will make the A team.

Soccer Movies

I noticed some discussion recently about what the best soccer movies are. Unfortunately everyone seems to have gotten the impression that soccer movies should be entertaining. I’m not sure where that crazy idea came from. The movies suggested are the usual suspects including Goal, A Shot At Glory and the perfectly believable Victory in which Pele and Rocky Balboa escape from a German POW camp, but not until after the second half of a soccer match in which they overcome a bunch of Nazis and a partisan referee in a plot line lifted directly from the Michigan State Cup final of 2006.

The problem with these movies is that they don’t really reflect youth soccer. To understand the issues in the kids game you need to look at other movies such as Basic Instinct, in which Sharon Stone demonstrates my often copied interview technique to make sure my kids end on the A team, and Fatal Attraction in which Glen Close shows us all how we should react if our kid gets left on the bench. Billy Bob Thornton’s Mr Woodcock is, of course, directly modeled on Michigan’s most famous DOC, and we all know who the Cheech & Chong of Michigan soccer coaches are.

My own favorite allegory of Youth Soccer is, of course, Jurassic Park in which the Velociraptors represent the little upstart clubs out to change the world but who get swallowed up by the big dinosaurs at the end.

Cash For Clunkers

In an attempt to continue to stimulate the economy, President Obama is expected to announce today that the Cash For Clunkers program will be extended to cover the youth soccer community. Disgruntled parents will receive a deep discount on new highly efficient coaches when they trade in their current bloated beer guzzlers. Priority will be given to parents still using 1969 or earlier models fitted with single or double knee braces. All heavy front end models traded in during the program will be rendered useless by pretty much leaving them as they are. Qualifying replacement models will be subject to strict requirements including tight cryuff turn abilities and low volatility emissions. Foreign imports will be eligible for double discounts as the government continues with its program of taking a good idea and screwing up the implementation. Questioned on whether or not this was throwing away a lot of valuable experience, and if he was worried about the inherent dangers of young coaches in charge of impressionable teens, the President replied “That’s just stupid! Oh wait, ……. I didn’t mean to say stupid”.