Soccer Lady

We’re in our second round of kid sports. First tee ball, and now soccer. I’m a soccer mom, and it’s everything that cliché phrase would lead you to believe. It’s piles of cut up oranges at half time, and lugging chairs and umbrellas and giant water bottles on and off the field every Saturday. Bubette is still too young to really care, but for many, many years I was the older sister along for the ride at these things. My brother played sports for years. Baseball, soccer, basketball and hockey. He played for a coach named Benny on a team called the Jets. (B-b-b-Benny!)

When I was in sixth grade I decided to play soccer. As luck would have it I ended up on the best team in the league. Razzmatazz, with our electric purple uniforms, went on to play teams from all over - including a team from Canada - which seemed rather exotic at the time. They gave us I heart BC pins that I kept on my bulletin board until college. I remember being extremely pissed when my brother didn’t have to come to my games. I had spent many years worth of Saturdays on the sidelines at his games (and would end up shuttling him to and from hockey practice years down the line) and it was my turn. But, he who whines the loudest wins, I guess.

I signed up to play again the next year, and ended up not playing when my charm school class conflicted with practice. (Two years in charm school, six in cotillion.)

That is not a joke. 

I played again in high school, and this is where I realized that I was a horrible soccer player. See, unbeknownst to me, in recreational soccer there’s a rule that everyone has to play at least half of the game.  I mean, I didn’t think I was Mia Hamm, but I didn’t realize that they were just humoring me. I played for three years in high school, because I liked it, and also because I absolutely refused to participate in high school PE. (Now that I think about it, that amount of physical activity was also what allowed me to eat the way I did in high school.) Occasionally I would start a game, when our coach was trying to make a point to the girls who were good, but jerks. Every single year I got the coach’s award at the end of the year banquet -the award for the girl who really, really sucked, but showed up at practice and ran her little heart out anyway.

It’s way too soon to tell what sport will take for Bub, if any. Some friends are playing basketball next, and he said he wants to try that. When I mention tennis or swim team, he wants to try those too. I would prefer golf, which I imagine has the lowest injury rate in the sports world. Just… no one tell him about Felix Baumgartner, okay?