So, Memorial weekend rolls around once again and we honor our servicemen in the traditional way by making fools of ourselves at youth sports tournaments all across the land of the free and the home of the self-centered. With winter well and truly behind us, we Michiganders like to leave our local rivals behind by driving six hundred miles or so south where we get to play exotic teams like Michigan Rush, Michigan Hawks, Michigan Chill and Michigan Express. I wonder where all the Ohio, Illinois and Indiana teams are this weekend? Detroit, I guess.
Still there’s something fun about frying ourselves in the first really hot weekend of the year. All that pasty white flesh turning brighter and brighter red as we work our way towards the semi-finals safe in the knowledge that the locals will invoke some obscure tournament rule that knocks us out on the fifth level of the tie-break decision making process.
The difference between the women’s game and men’s soccer comes sharply into focus as the girls stand patiently in long lines to the ladies rest room while the guys are done in no time at all and emerge with the sort of self satisfied smile that comes from the realization that the ability to pee standing up is your one advantage in life. I’ve made many an unfortunate ‘friendship’ over the years by being stuck beside some too-much-information type mother of three as we inch our way forward in the line for a call of nature. I well remember one girl who was dancing on her tippy-toes murmuring ‘mommy daddy mommy daddy’. I figured she was either excited to have made the final or was realizing she wasn’t going to make it to the head of the line in time.
For some reason this weekend is also the time a lot of us moms decide to try and dress like we are twenty years younger than we really are. The number of mature women squeezed into bikini tops that are far too small for them is breath taking. It’s almost as if they think that the men folks will be even more attracted to them if they appear to have four boobs instead of just two.
After the games we get to go back to the over-priced hotel mandated by the tournament organizers and marvel at how ill-prepared it is possible to be for “welcoming” a couple of hundred excitable kids. But it’s all forgotten as we take the field once again, harangue the refs, abuse the kids, and remember what this holiday weekend is really all about.
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Sunday, May 30, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
New Policy
So we have come to my favorite time of year in Michigan youth soccer. The spring season culminates with the boy’s State Cup Finals. The finalists were decided last weekend when everyone hitchhiked up to Saginaw (little S&G reference for all you sixties stoners out there) and, although the quarters and semis are actually over, it feels like they are still being played out on the local on-line forum where the traditional parental sport of ‘refusing to accept the result’ is in full flow.
The last two teams in each of the seven different age groups will fight for the right to call themselves ‘State Cup Champions” for a whole year! Except, of course, the U13 Girls who also have their State Cup in the spring, and for some uniquely hair-brained Michigan reason they will only be fighting for the chance to be State Cup Champions for about four months.
Like most folks, however, I’m absolutely livid that this year’s finals are going to be played on that perfect surface in the air-conditioned, up lighted, confines of the finest indoor soccer arena in North America. As I reluctantly take my seat in one of the 2,000 tiered seats with a perfect view I’ll be reminding every one the State Cup finals should be played in the searing heat with us parents huddled around the rock hard surface and long grass in Farmington Hills (although you have to park in Novi and walk if you want to have any chance of seeing the games). It just won’t be the same without at least one of the games being interrupted by a lightning storm.
The big problem is that from the high of State Cup finals it’s only six days to the low of tryouts for next season where we'll have the ritual torture of kids being cut from teams where they won State medals just the previous weekend. And I know it works both ways with kids voluntarily leaving teams that just took them all the way too. The outcome is that Michigan sends it’s teams off to the Region II Tournament with the solid, team building, all-for-one/one-for-all core of a group of kids who have already been cut or who have already jumped ship.
So to overcome this delicate situation we’ve come up with the idea of not telling the kids they have been cut so that they don’t get discouraged! And coaches will not be allowed to ask their best kids if they are definitely coming back next season to prevent them acting like dicks when their superstars take off to play with someone else’s Academy! How’s that for a solution to a difficult problem? We’ve decided to call this ridiculous new, un-enforceable and hopefully quickly repealed policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
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The last two teams in each of the seven different age groups will fight for the right to call themselves ‘State Cup Champions” for a whole year! Except, of course, the U13 Girls who also have their State Cup in the spring, and for some uniquely hair-brained Michigan reason they will only be fighting for the chance to be State Cup Champions for about four months.
Like most folks, however, I’m absolutely livid that this year’s finals are going to be played on that perfect surface in the air-conditioned, up lighted, confines of the finest indoor soccer arena in North America. As I reluctantly take my seat in one of the 2,000 tiered seats with a perfect view I’ll be reminding every one the State Cup finals should be played in the searing heat with us parents huddled around the rock hard surface and long grass in Farmington Hills (although you have to park in Novi and walk if you want to have any chance of seeing the games). It just won’t be the same without at least one of the games being interrupted by a lightning storm.
The big problem is that from the high of State Cup finals it’s only six days to the low of tryouts for next season where we'll have the ritual torture of kids being cut from teams where they won State medals just the previous weekend. And I know it works both ways with kids voluntarily leaving teams that just took them all the way too. The outcome is that Michigan sends it’s teams off to the Region II Tournament with the solid, team building, all-for-one/one-for-all core of a group of kids who have already been cut or who have already jumped ship.
So to overcome this delicate situation we’ve come up with the idea of not telling the kids they have been cut so that they don’t get discouraged! And coaches will not be allowed to ask their best kids if they are definitely coming back next season to prevent them acting like dicks when their superstars take off to play with someone else’s Academy! How’s that for a solution to a difficult problem? We’ve decided to call this ridiculous new, un-enforceable and hopefully quickly repealed policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
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Friday, May 7, 2010
Its All Politics
So after years with the same club my daughter has just been told at tryouts that she’s been cut from the team! I’m devastated and I can’t face the thought of facing all those smug bitches that have been waiting for this moment. The only thing worse than a smug soccer player is a smug soccer player’s mother. Hopefully the totally dignified way that I have behaved over the years will stand me in good stead.
I think the one thing that will be clear to every fair and balanced person is that this is obviously a political decision. The facts are there for all to see. She made the team every year under the Bush administration and now she gets cut under the watch of this Obama character. What more can I say? Now I know that I didn’t vote for this evasive foreign jihadist but I was quite prepared to accept the democratic process and give the office of President of the United States it’s due respect, even though the incumbent is a lazy, socialist, sponging, terrorist.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt when he personally organized the fall of the big banks, and I was still with him even though he himself started the war in Iraq and used his Satanic powers to summon up Hurricane Katrina. Even recently when he set fire to that oil rig in the gulf and helped this Faisal chappy to drive his JAPANESE vehicle into Times Square I still stood by him. And I know that the evidence on the internet that he shot JFK and faked the moon landings is beginning to build up, but I still gave him the benefit of the doubt. Until this week that is, when he started paying back the soccer moms who didn’t vote for him by arranging to get their kids cut.
So at least I was able to console my daughter with the knowledge that it was nothing to do with her and that the true benefit of the polarization of American society is that she’ll always have someone else to blame.
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I think the one thing that will be clear to every fair and balanced person is that this is obviously a political decision. The facts are there for all to see. She made the team every year under the Bush administration and now she gets cut under the watch of this Obama character. What more can I say? Now I know that I didn’t vote for this evasive foreign jihadist but I was quite prepared to accept the democratic process and give the office of President of the United States it’s due respect, even though the incumbent is a lazy, socialist, sponging, terrorist.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt when he personally organized the fall of the big banks, and I was still with him even though he himself started the war in Iraq and used his Satanic powers to summon up Hurricane Katrina. Even recently when he set fire to that oil rig in the gulf and helped this Faisal chappy to drive his JAPANESE vehicle into Times Square I still stood by him. And I know that the evidence on the internet that he shot JFK and faked the moon landings is beginning to build up, but I still gave him the benefit of the doubt. Until this week that is, when he started paying back the soccer moms who didn’t vote for him by arranging to get their kids cut.
So at least I was able to console my daughter with the knowledge that it was nothing to do with her and that the true benefit of the polarization of American society is that she’ll always have someone else to blame.
Find me on Facebook.
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