My Season Begins

And so the Labor Day holiday brings the official start of another soccer season. From here on out the travel programs can play league games and the high school boys can play their conference games. I’ve always thought that Labor Day was a bit of an un-American holiday given it’s socialist overtones and so I’m going to suggest we re-name it ‘Three Check Day’ since most of us travel soccer parents have already written three checks to their soccer club by the time the start of September rolls around. It’s funny how we are all desperate to write that first check at tryouts in June so that it feels like our kid really has made the team, but how we resent writing the third one because we still haven’t seen anything in return.

That’s not to suggest that financial problems are exclusive to travel soccer. Our boys high school program has had severe cut backs this season. The Varsity assistant coach is no longer going to be a paid post, the uniforms have to be used for a seventh season, the bus will only take the kids to away games leaving them to make their own way back, and the qualified athletic trainer has been replaced by a volunteer in the shape of Eddie Zabrinski’s uncle Benny who took a pre-veterinarian class in Idaho in 1968. With the money saved the school should be able to add another assistant coach to stand alongside the seven other 350lb train wrecks that “coach” the football program.

I guess the nightmare scenario for the school will be if un-qualified Benny treats an injured player by wrapping a flea invested seven year old jersey around an open cut and then leaves the disoriented kid to drive himself home to the suburbs from somewhere in downtown Flint, Michigan. Still, maybe the kid won’t live long enough to sue.

The tough part of any new season is, of course, scheduling. Monday night is the worst for us. I pick the little one up at 3pm and drop her at practice where she waits alone for 40 minutes with a pop-tart and Gatorade for the rest of her team to show up. I dash off to pick up the boy and get him to practice before taking the eldest to conditioning classes and get back for the little one hoping to goodness that I’m not last to arrive because I still worry over those stories about our coach and the U15 goalkeeper. We can usually swing back for the boy in time and if he jumps straight in the car we can normally stand the smell of his shinpads because it means we don’t have to listen to my eldest bitching about how long she’s had to wait. Of course it all goes FUBAR if the boy’s coach does his usual ‘extra running because that’s what I did back in the 70s’ thing. From there we like to sit down as a family and have a well-balanced, nutritious, meal from the drive-through at Taco-Bell. If I get home early enough the kids might just manage their homework while I wash the gear for tomorrow and try as hard as I can to remember what the coach said about us all needing to show a little more dedication.



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