Monday, September 25, 2023

The Palominos



My youngest daughter, Julia, played soccer for a number of years with a group of school friends. They called themselves the Palominos.

The coaches were two of the team Dads; I helped out from time to time.

Although the kids had fun, they didn’t enjoy success on the pitch. And they only rarely scored goals. Very rarely.

After several seasons of this, their all-time record stood at 0-19-1. (That one draw was an occasion for a big team party.)

Between seasons, some of the other parents came to me with an idea. Could Julia’s big brother, Aidan, possibly be convinced to take over the coaching duties of the team?

At the time, Aidan was an All-City soccer star at Balboa High School and also the center back on the San Francisco Seals travel team, but he was also just a few years older than Julia and her teammates. He surprised me when he said he’d give it a go.

He attended a coach’s class taught by a university and got certified. He registered, was finger-printed and issued a license to coach soccer in the city and county of San Francisco.

At the time, a city official told me, he was the youngest coach in the entire city.

He read books, watched videos and discussed the matter with his own coaches. He bought a clipboard, a whistle, practice cones, balls and a rulebook.

Taking a cue from his high school coaches, he made practices mandatory. “To start in games you have to attend practice” was his primary rule. He also instituted a question and answer session at practice.

In this way, he discovered the reason that one girl only took long shots from outside the box because she thought she would be whistled “offside” should she enter the box! There were many things about this game they’d never learned.

He also taught the girls to use their physical assets, whatever they might be. One example: Julia played defense. She was strong but not fast. He taught her to use angles to cut in front of opponents rushing toward the goal and her strength to knock them off the ball. She couldn’t outrun them but she could outsmart them and she was as tough as anyone her age.

Being a coach’s Dad gave me a whole new appreciation for the game and the pressures coaches face — from opponents, parents, spectators, and strangers. It was incredibly challenging emotionally.

One man whose daughter habitually skipped practice shouted at Aidan furiously when he benched her during games. Aidan stayed calm. “I told him the rule,” he explained to me afterward. (It had been all I could do to keep myself from decking the jerk.) 

One opposing coach pulled out an obscure rule stating that meant Aidan couldn’t stand with the team during a game because he was underage. So he stood on the spectator side and used his cellphone to give instructions to one of the Dads who served in his absence. (I’d wanted to kill that jerk too.)

Through all these challenges and many more, the Palominos under his leadership forged a remarkable turnaround. They played better than ever before and began for the first time in their history to win matches.

Lots of matches.

By the season’s end, they’d finished in second place in the league with only one loss and one draw. They outscored their opponents by an average score of 3 to 1.

The other parents had been right. Hiring a kid to coach their kids turned the entire program around. And they were still having fun.

Over the years, I spent many, many hours cheering for my kids when they played sports. They won a lot of games and they lost a lot of games. There were many ups and many downs. But looking back now, the most emotional season of them all by far was the one when Aidan coached Julia and the Palominos.

The girls all called him “Coach.”

Even Julia.

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