5 Things I Learned the Hard Way About Being a Soccer Dad: A Postcard from the End of the Road You’re On
Youth soccer is a long and complicated family project. You hope your athlete gets a character-building experience to draw on for the rest of their life. And you hope your family emerges not exhausted, but enriched by the experience.
That’s a lot to ask, especially from the youth soccer scene these days. And it’s not going to happen automatically.
That understanding dawned slowly on me and my wife as we accompanied our daughter through with kiddie games and AYSO soccer to the travel soccer gauntlet and the college recruiting process, all the way through Division I.
I kept track of the lessons we learned on this jangled journey, and I share a few in these excerpts my forthcoming book, Soccer Dad.
1. Take sports parenting as seriously as you take all parenting.
Parents who unfold their new canvas camping chairs on their first sideline thinking this is the “fun” part of being a dad or mom will be surprised by how much work it is. And, how fundamentally demanding a challenge.
Essentially, you must simultaneously become knowledgeable about a complex, murky and ever-evolving club sports scene and maybe the college recruiting system, too … and also measured and serene in the way you employ that knowledge in guiding your kid, who must never be confused about which of you wants success more.
Yes, youth sports parenting can be fun. But it’s also a formidable parental assignment: protecting without steering, motivating without pushing and protecting without smothering.
2. Do whatever you can to keep your child from being damaged …
There are dangers in every sport and every other passionate pursuit. Parents can’t keep their kids from getting hurt. But they must do everything they can to avoid wounds—physical or emotional—that will not heal. For instance: There are lots of competing theories about when and how to allow kids to begin heading the ball. Consume them all—and err, even grossly, on the side of caution. You can make a lot of mistakes as a parent. But getting your kid through their childhood without damage to their “deep brain structure”: That’s pretty much a bare-minimum parenting requirement.
Similarly: Yes, your kid will inevitably have a dumb coach or two, who will stay thoughtless and even damaging things—a coach called our daughter “selfish” when she was nine and she didn’t shoot for two years. But coaching and cultural toxicity, you have to smell out yourself because your child is too vulnerable to recognize it or to survive it without lasting harm.
3. … but don’t try to prevent your kid from being hurt. (Their being
hurt is part of the point.)
As your child climbs the various levels of youth sports, the stakes get higher and the agonies and anxieties grow—for them, and for you. That’s why youth sports psychology is flourishing. But until sports parent psychology inevitably emerges, parents are stuck talking sense to themselves, and one another.
At a college playoff game when our daughters were juniors and the team was struggling, another anguished dad agonized to me about how hard it was to watch our daughters “suffer.” I told him I had the same feelings but had been trying (through near-daily meditation) to take the largest view of this project—that it’s not really about the soccer but about life, and how to handle good fortune and bad, deserved or not. Which our young women were learning. And which was the whole point of this project all along. Wasn’t it?
4. Keep your family’s eyes on a higher prize.
We’re not a religious family, but we found spiritual sustenance on our sports journey by keeping a shared larger purpose in mind. For us, that purpose had do with enjoying and nurturing at every level, the kinds of bonds only sports teams can forge—in our case, bonds among girls and women.
Your family’s “why” might be different. But I do think it’s necessary. A serious modern American youth sports career—and after the age of about eight, there really is no other kind anymore—is less family recreation and more family epic. You need great heroes and large themes to sustain you all through the long, silent drives home from early tournament losses. The seasons and even years of seemingly stalled soccer progress. Competing, conflicting family priorities, financial and otherwise.
You’ll ask yourselves why you do this. And your family will need a better reason than “to get a college soccer scholarship,” which is no pot of gold at the end of any rainbow, but just the most challenging chapter in the same odyssey.
5. Don’t dwell on your mistakes—and yes, don’t forget to have fun.
You tell your athlete these things, and you need to tell yourself the same, because you’ll make just as many mistakes by omission and commission on the sidelines as your growing kid will, on the pitch.
In Soccer Dad, I call myself by turns “lazy,” “self-righteous”, “complacent” and “a dumbf*** dad”—and this is all before my daughter was 12, and the job really got complicated.
You, too, will be lazy at times as a soccer parent—and alternately overbearing as well. If you feel you are, you probably are. Correct. Adjust. Play on. Just as you’d advise your soccer kid to do after making a mental mistake in the middle of a chaotic, competitive game. And enjoy yourself. As my daughter got older and soccer got more serious, I frequently asked her a simple question: “Does it still cross your mind when you’re out there playing—in the middle of the coaches’ shouting on one side and the parents’ on the other—how wonderful it is be on this field, playing this game?”
She always answered with an unequivocal, “Yes.”
My wife and I did, too.
Can you?
For more information about the author and book, here are some links!
0 comments