My daughter’s coach has asked if I’d like to be his date at a society wedding in Rochester Hills next weekend. It’s a little bit of a late invitation because it seems his current girlfriend has decided to go back to her husband, leaving him without a partner for the wedding and without a left sided central defender for the fall season. I feel a little bit like how a guest player must feel at a showcase tournament and I’m wondering what tactics I should use?
Part of me thinks that I should agree but be really demanding and insist that he sends a cab to pick me, cover the cost of my room in the hotel, and take care of breakfast in the morning. I was even going to insist that I “play the whole game” but I’m worried that he’ll misinterpret that suggestion.
On the other hand I could just gratefully accept and then let him play me as he sees fit. I guess that might be more acceptable to the rest of the guests who won’t really be expecting to see me playing in some other girl’s position.
So I’m not quite sure what the protocol is because I guess there’s no fixed etiquette as last minute guests are brought in for lots of different reasons.
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Monday, August 2, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Summer Soccer
We are only a couple of weeks into the school summer break and the kids are driving me nuts already. For some reason they’ve gotten it into their head that this is some kind of soccer ‘off season’ which means they can lay in bed until after 7am when they should be out doing their daily conditioning run. I know it’s tough on them but recent events in South Africa have proven once-and-for-all that it is down to soccer parents like me to carve out a future for our national teams on the world stage. Lord knows that the so-called experts with their “Project 2010” thing haven’t exactly brought home the bacon have they? So move over you guys and accept that we soccer parents are the solution instead of the problem you have been making us out to be.
Summer afternoons are, of course, the perfect time for college showcase tournaments! I love to pull up my fancy lawn chair with the sunshade canopy, cold drinks holder, and battery powered fan, at the side of a soccer field where 22 desperate teenagers are ignoring all the ideals of team play as they sweat buckets to individually impress some pimply 20 year old assistant associate volunteer coach from a D6 school in The Edge of Oblivion, Idaho. However, there seems to be some problem for my kids with playing soccer in the hottest part of a 90-degree day. They never seem to show their best in these summer showcases. I wonder what the problem could be?
But like all kids they are smart enough to use the opportunity to get me to shell out on all the latest gear. My eldest daughter has even gone so far as to ask me to get her a sports bra. Apparently she thinks it will help her to “stop jiggling” when she runs with the ball. I told her she won’t get a second look from any of these college coaches with that kind of attitude.
Meanwhile my boy is glued to the TV watching the South African Vuvuzela Symphony Orchestra going through its paces at some obscure sporting event. It’s some crazy game where offside doesn’t matter and putting the ball into the net doesn’t seem to count. It kind of puts our problems in perspective.
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Summer afternoons are, of course, the perfect time for college showcase tournaments! I love to pull up my fancy lawn chair with the sunshade canopy, cold drinks holder, and battery powered fan, at the side of a soccer field where 22 desperate teenagers are ignoring all the ideals of team play as they sweat buckets to individually impress some pimply 20 year old assistant associate volunteer coach from a D6 school in The Edge of Oblivion, Idaho. However, there seems to be some problem for my kids with playing soccer in the hottest part of a 90-degree day. They never seem to show their best in these summer showcases. I wonder what the problem could be?
But like all kids they are smart enough to use the opportunity to get me to shell out on all the latest gear. My eldest daughter has even gone so far as to ask me to get her a sports bra. Apparently she thinks it will help her to “stop jiggling” when she runs with the ball. I told her she won’t get a second look from any of these college coaches with that kind of attitude.
Meanwhile my boy is glued to the TV watching the South African Vuvuzela Symphony Orchestra going through its paces at some obscure sporting event. It’s some crazy game where offside doesn’t matter and putting the ball into the net doesn’t seem to count. It kind of puts our problems in perspective.
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Monday, June 28, 2010
From Your Super Soaraway Sun Newspaper
Don Fabio Crapello has failed in his bid to become the first pizza tosser to be made a Knight of the Realm and is now likely to face the axe of her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth Borden. In a foolhardy bid to revolutionize a nation’s 44-year obsession with repeating a feat of immense luck, Crapello introduced a distinctly Italian approach by encouraging senior players to pork each other’s girlfriends and to surrender when the going got tough. His Latin methodology did not sit well with traditional English characteristics of thinking you’ve done all the work in the qualifiers and believing you are as good as this newspaper built you up to be.
A period of national mourning has been announced in England whilst Scotland, Wales and Ireland will introduce a program of street parties amid scenes of unbridled joy. In a related development hundreds of English ex-pat soccer coaches in the United States have suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth and the blogosphere. In the meantime the whole UK will dust itself down, pick itself up, and look forward to a Brit winning Wimbledon.
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A period of national mourning has been announced in England whilst Scotland, Wales and Ireland will introduce a program of street parties amid scenes of unbridled joy. In a related development hundreds of English ex-pat soccer coaches in the United States have suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth and the blogosphere. In the meantime the whole UK will dust itself down, pick itself up, and look forward to a Brit winning Wimbledon.
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Wednesday, June 16, 2010
The Original Soundtrack
So the World Cup came back to Borden Park on Saturday. It was here in this suburban Detroit park that teams playing their matches at the Silverdome would practice during the 1994 tournament. How well I remember trying to catch Hagi’s attention in the hope that he’d show me his ball skills.
For this year’s World Cup one of the local clubs had arranged for Borden to present a big screen showing of the game in which we summoned up the spirit of 1776 and 1950 to take on the mighty-in-their-own-mind English and their British Bulldog coach with his Italian accent. It was such a melting pot of cultures as traditional African vuvuzela horns, fashioned from cheap plastics in China, were sold at inflated prices in a classic example American exploitation. As I shelled out my greenbacks I truly felt I was part of what the World Cup has come to represent in 2010.
As I laid my Burberry rug out on the grass and settled down to watch the game, the sound of the local kids blowing their vuvuzelas carried me across the miles and I wondered what they would sound like in the cauldron of the stadium in which our boys prepared to do battle. Even as the English scored their first and last goal I was wondering what a vuvuzela would sound like ringing across the plains of the Serengeti. I wondered what a vuvuzela would sound like in the hands of a magnificent Zulu warrior calling his brothers to arms. But as the second half kicked off I was beginning to wonder what a vuvuzela would sound like shoved firmly up the arse of the pain-in-the-butt 'fans' ruining the frickin’ game.
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For this year’s World Cup one of the local clubs had arranged for Borden to present a big screen showing of the game in which we summoned up the spirit of 1776 and 1950 to take on the mighty-in-their-own-mind English and their British Bulldog coach with his Italian accent. It was such a melting pot of cultures as traditional African vuvuzela horns, fashioned from cheap plastics in China, were sold at inflated prices in a classic example American exploitation. As I shelled out my greenbacks I truly felt I was part of what the World Cup has come to represent in 2010.
As I laid my Burberry rug out on the grass and settled down to watch the game, the sound of the local kids blowing their vuvuzelas carried me across the miles and I wondered what they would sound like in the cauldron of the stadium in which our boys prepared to do battle. Even as the English scored their first and last goal I was wondering what a vuvuzela would sound like ringing across the plains of the Serengeti. I wondered what a vuvuzela would sound like in the hands of a magnificent Zulu warrior calling his brothers to arms. But as the second half kicked off I was beginning to wonder what a vuvuzela would sound like shoved firmly up the arse of the pain-in-the-butt 'fans' ruining the frickin’ game.
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Tuesday, June 15, 2010
It's All Balls
OK, enough already! Will you all please just get off my kids’ back? The result today had nothing to do with her! Yes, I know she may have given the impression that all six of their goals were the result of her having the hand/eye co-ordination of an English goalkeeper, but please, stop the cries of “Sub-out, retard”. There is no way that a highly trained, elite premier, super academy, ECNL, Divison-1-bound kid like mine would ever make a mistake. So it must have been that new Adidas ball.
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Sunday, May 30, 2010
Out Of State, Out Of (Our) Mind
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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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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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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