Get Coach!

Say goodbye to Mondays. Twelve girls have signed up, the assistant coach has committed to another season, and I can’t actually say no. I will again wake up an hour early on Mondays, go to work early, and leave early to coach my daughter’s soccer team of 6- and 7-year-old girls, the Marauders—though this year we might change our name to something not so bellicose, a little less burn-your-house-and-ravage-your-land.

Do you know what it’s like to be in charge of small children but not really in charge? You say shhh, and they begin screaming? You pull them off a wobbly bookcase as they attempt to scale it, but then they run to the kitchen to play with steak knives?

A friend told me a story recently. She’d asked her sister, a mother of two, what she and the kids were up to that afternoon. “Well,” said the sister, “we went outside and began to play in the new driveway. But instead of playing with the ball, the girls ate loose pieces of the fresh blacktop, and I tried to stop them.” As a parent and now as a coach I’ve had my share of the-kids-are-eating-blacktop moments.

I knew I was overmatched about 30 seconds into our first practice last year. We began by gathering around in a circle and saying our names. The first girl said, “Hi, I’m Melinda.” The next said, “Hi, I’m Roseanne.” And the third said, “Hi, I’m sarcastic.”

Sarcastic was a beautiful little girl with a funny, shrill laugh who, if I left her in the game a second too long, simply lay down on the soccer field and began to rest, no matter what was going on around her. During a practice, after I had made yet another attempt to redirect her energy away from wisecracking and toward the actual playing of soccer, one of her friends, Jill, a 5-year-old, turned to me and said, “She really annoys you, doesn’t she?”

“What are you talking about, Jill?” I replied, all poker face. “I love playing soccer with Sarcastic.”