From The Courts

Attorney Johnny Weasel of the law firm Phile, Threten & Settle lodged a claim today in Oakland County Small Claims Court against local soccer club Michigan Fantasy. Acting on behalf of disgruntled parent Al Spyneless, Weasel is seeking the return of $3,500 in coaching fees paid to the club. Weasel alleges that the soccer club’s Technical Director Neal Silvatongue used his position of power and influence to enter into a sexual relationship with his client’s wife, Barby Trophy-Spyneless. Attorney Weasel accepts that the soccer coach and his victim were free to indulge in their behaviour but that his client should not be obliged to pay for the services rendered.

Michigan Fantasy have launched a counter claim in which they allege that their employee effectively provided additional services over and above what Spyneless had paid for and that he should be liable for the balance.

Meanwhile the independent pressure group Advocates For Children has filed suit against the club, the coach, the parents, and the ambulance chasing law firm. They are acting on behalf of the soccer playing kid who is caught in the crossfire and whom they allege was the last person anyone thought about before they went about their business.

Crazy Men!

WTF is it with the male of the species? Are they all nuts or is it just the ones in my circle? I swear that if wasn’t for the fact that we need them for the occasional bit of hammering and nailing, I would handle everything myself.

The latest screw up down our way was when bonehead boy and his estranged father decided to spend their quality time together at Knub’s Knob ski center last weekend! The kid is a development academy player and he’s indulging in a risky pursuit with a flamed out dopehead fresh out of addiction rehab! Then, to make matters worse, they eat flatiron steaks and Texas fries washed down with chocolate milk shakes for dinner, and stay up till 3am watching adult DVDs in 3D on his father’s 96” HD widescreen. This on the eve of an academy scrimmage against Canton Community College’s B team! WTF were they thinking?

Fortunately he is back with me this weekend as the regular season for the Academy starts tomorrow. I kept him out of school today and got an extension on his homework so that his mind is clear. His girlfriend is banished for the weekend and he can get his cellphone back provided he starts the game. I made him some tasty bran and banana for breakfast, pasta for lunch, pasta for dinner and pasta for supper. He had his vitamins, his supplements, his energy drinks and that stuff that they don’t test for yet at his age. Lights out is 9.30pm. I also removed the copy of Playboy that he keeps under his bed and we had a serious adult conversation about it to the point where he understands that I’m not a prude, and I understand that it’s very natural, but that he shouldn’t take care of that until after the game in case it drains all his energy. I think he understood and so I didn’t insist that we tie his arm to the bedpost.

I think he’s happy that I cut him a lot more slack than the fanatical parents on our team who live vicariously through their kids.



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Flaunty Shannon And The Holy Grail

My eldest daughter’s friend Shannon has shown the world that it can be done with the news that she’s landed a full ride soccer scholarship to a Division 1 school! This is such a significant piece of news that I’ve actually tried hard to make it look like I’m genuinely pleased for her, and that I can stand to see her flaunting her new school colors in our face at every practice. She’ll be playing at Southern Michigan University where the athletic teams used to be called “The Crusaders”. However, they dropped that name when they opened their first foreign campus in Baghdad, Iraq. They’ve now settled on the new name of “The Foreclosures” to give them a nice solid sense of being part of Michigan. It’s not a school that I know a great deal about but I’m busily trawling the internet to try and find a few prime faults about the place so that I can disparage the girl as soon as her back is turned.

Got to say that I’m a little bit surprised that she made it this far. I mean, she’s a decent solid player but she’s nothing spectacular and never played with a really top price club. She wasn’t the most dedicated player either and I always thought was a little bit too studious and GPA fixated to make it as a top athlete. Plus she wasn’t much of a social animal and didn’t even get invited to go with the rest of the girls down to Cancun last Spring Break for their “Farewell To Highschool, Chastity and Sobriety” trip. So really I can’t see what the attraction is for the coach that has recruited her?

But maybe not everything is as good as it seems for Little Miss Perfect! One of the other girls, Roz Lynn Chapple, has been looking in to this so-called “full ride” business. With Division 1 schools only having 14 full soccer scholarships to hand out to their girls teams she was as surprised as everyone else that Shannon got one. But it turns out she’s only getting 20% for soccer with the rest made up of academic money and a bunch of other little grants that she spent her time applying for when she should have been on the practice field. Ha! You can always trust Roz Lynn Chapple to find where the truth is buried!

So I hope that Shannon has learned that if she hadn’t wasted all that time studying and applying for support she might just have won one of those mythical Full Rides and really earned our respect.

Too Late

I'm thinking that maybe I started this Facebook deal a little bit too late. I know I’ve been telling everyone that the idea was that I could get to know the people that read my blog, but that wasn’t the only reason I set up the account. Really what I wanted to do was get to know the new high school coach. He really is a bit of a dish and my daughter and all the other girls have been raving about him. So I thought I’d friend him on Facebook, send a few innuendo laden private messages, then post a picture or two of me flashing my stimulus packages, and hey presto! He’d be like every other soccer coach in the history of the beautiful game – putty in the hands of a loose living, morally bankrupt, middle age mom in her prime.

It was all going pretty well and I reckoned I had enough incriminating replies from him to ensure that my daughter was named team captain and started every game. But then the buzz-killing athletic director gets ideas above his pay grade and puts an end to free speech, free love and expensive mistakes. “No Facebook fraternizing with the students and parents” is the new rule at Stalag Westchester High. Of course the AD knows all about how new technology can land you in trouble as we all remember that time his plan to make the school secretary ‘howl like a wolf on heat’ became a little bit too public when he hit the “Reply All” button.

So the fun is over with the coach for the time being, but maybe I’ll get a chat with him at the meeting tonight. We are having a conference to sort out a few problems with the team. Apparently one of the kids on the roster is being bullied by a few of the others. Lots of name calling and posting of pictures shot in the locker room. The poor girl is a wreck and has taken to hurting herself. I can’t help but think that if we’d been able to keep an eye on these kid’s Facebook accounts one of us could have put a stop to it before it got out of hand.



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Seven Days Later

Well a full week has come and gone since national signing day and my eldest daughter has still not been committed to any particular institution. The reason for that is she is still weighing up her options and is playing one school off against another to try and tease out a little bit more financial support and some more assurances on playing time in her freshman year. It has got absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the nearest she came to an offer was a National Letter of Indifference from almost every school in the Midwest.

I hear that at the boy’s Academy team practices last Wednesday all the kids in the Class of 2010 were showing up in brand new regalia of the school they had signed for that day. Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern, and Indiana were all represented. Fortunately my son’s t-shirt from the Frankenmuth Zhenders Chicken Frying School of Excellence was still in the laundry.

So, I’ve got to be honest and say that I’m a little bit concerned that my daughter will make the right decision and choose a school that reflects the amount of cash I’ve sunk into travel soccer over the years. I pray that we don’t end up like the poor kid on her team who ended up accepting a spot in a school that doesn’t even have a soccer program in what her mother calls an “educational decision”. There are some crazy-ass parents out there.

Which Team Are You On?

My youngest is in a little bit of a difficult situation at the moment. She played as a guest for a pretty prestigious team this past weekend and being surrounded by other good players seemed to bring out the best in her. The rest of the girls on her current team were really excited for her getting the chance to play with one of the big clubs and I think her coach thought that he must be doing something right to have one of his players invited to play with them. She was hoping that maybe she could tryout for this team in the summer but then her current coach said he’d be glad to sign a release for her if the big club wanted her now as he thought it was a great opportunity. That was music to the ears of the big club’s coach who has been on the lookout for a strong left sided player and he just happens to be the ODP coach for her age group so he’s a great guy to have on your side. The rest of the parents on the current team are sad to see her go but are pleased that it frees up more field time for some of the fringe players on our team and it shows the rest of the kids that it can be done. So where’s the problem? Well her dad (aka Attilla The Hun) has a hard and fast mindset that only liberal quitters leave a team in mid season and says he’s going to “teach her the meaning of the word commitment”.

Back In The Saddle

So I got a call out of the blue on Friday night asking me to ‘come out of retirement’ and sub-in on my girlfriend’s over 30 soccer team. She plays on a co-ed side called the Bengay Tigers in a 6v6 league which holds it’s games in a converted auto plant with a playing surface designed specifically to knock the crap out of aging knees. I didn’t need to be asked twice and before you knew it I had looked out all the essential equipment that a 48 year old, mother-of-three, soccer player needs: a pair of Adidas Sambas, a heavy-duty sports bra, and a ready supply of incontinence pads.

When I arrived the girls were already warming up leaving me on the bench with the guys as they tightened their knee braces, strapped their strapping, and filled their cups that runneth over. The heavy scent of menthol in the air brought back memories of the glory days when our star striker Gerry Attrick scored a last minute winner against Ludmuller Log And Lumber Liquidators in the final of the Detroit Narcotics Anonymous invitational. Then, just before kick off, there was one of those familiar screams of pain that let us all know that one of the guys had rubbed the Bengay a little bit too high up into his groin area.

The game itself was fine but the crowd was outrageous. The problem was that most of the players had brought their kids with them to watch. The little brats sat there on the sidelines shouting out instructions to us! Not only was that very distracting but what makes them such experts that they think they can tell us what to do? They also gave the referee a really hard time and blamed every player on the team for our problems except, of course, their own darling parents. There really is something disconcerting about listening to them disparaging our coach and you have to ask yourself where these kids get the idea that this is how you behave at the side of a soccer field?