This morning, my youngest daughter and I were up by 5:30 to drive down Highway 101 to the outskirts of San Jose. It was a cool and overcast morning, perfect for soccer.
Club level soccer is a demanding game; only a small portion of the kids who play soccer move on to this level, and in most places, far fewer girls than boys.
It has not been seen as a feminine option, in our culture, although that started changing in the 90s with the success of the U.S. Women's Olympic team.
From my perspective, it is an ultimate testament to femininity in the sense that a woman can be an athlete and use every ounce of her strength and speed and energy with every bit as much of beauty as any male.
What's good for the body is good for the mind and the soul.
In yesterday's games, the girls seemed tentative, holding back. Today they held back nothing. They came out to play and they played well. Though they lost, they contested the ball at every moment of confrontation, which in soccer is a constant stream of moments.
I was proud of my defender (#43 on the far right above) for her spirited play. Today she showed off the kinds of skills that got her to this level, standing strikers up, stripping the ball, running in spurts, and kicking accurate, long hard passes down field to set up scoring chances for her teammates.
She was at center back today, where her brother plays, and she looked a bit like him out there, at least from where I was sitting.
As I get to know a new set of parents along the sidelines, and cheer for new girls even before I learn their names, I again appreciate the value of team sports like this.
Parents have to make sacrifices -- it's costly, you drive a lot, and you cannot really have any kind of personal agenda for your weekends, but often I think that the very best moments of my life have been there on the sidelines, cheering my kids on, win or lose.
In these moments, time sometimes seems suspended, as if nothing else in life matters all that much. Watching these beautiful young people work together, play hard, and try to succeed makes me forget about the painful job losses, breakups, financial pressures, IRS audits, sad losses of friends who have passed, and many other depressing matters.
During a good game, when the outcome hangs in the balance, the world seems to slow down and come into a particular type of sharp focus. It's your child fighting for something beyond herself -- her team -- against other children fighting just as hard on behalf of their team.
Someone is going to lose and someone is going to win.
The air has a certain freshness; you can almost smell the ocean even when you are far inland. The sounds of the game -- the kids communicating with one another, the referee's whistle, the ball hitting the turf, the parents cheering them on, blur into a kind of poetry of motion.
The smells of fresh-cut grass, steaming coffee, perspiration, and sunscreen permeate your consciousness from time to time.
Sometimes you forget who you are, where you are, or why you are even there. At these times, you float like a being suspended up and down the line, engaged with the action as if you were connected to it by an invisible thread --an invisible thread of caring.
Of course, you want your kid and her team to win, but some part of you remembers the other parents of the other kids of the other team, and you empathize with them (as long as you are ahead!)
Mostly you at one with your child in this experience.
As I dropped her at her Mom's house after today's contest, my daughter flashed her lovely smile at me and said, "Thanks, Dad, for driving me and always being at my games. Some kids don't have that in their lives."
"You don't have to thank me," I replied, "because there is nowhere else on the planet I would rather be."
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment