MY DAUGHTER HAS BEEN on the same soccer team since she was six. Every year her skills have improved, even as her mother has remained a benchwarmer at the game of spectating. At the final whistle of one late-season match last year I broke away from my absorbing conversation with our star striker’s little sister—about the unbelievableness of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate pretzels, about what Bradley Cooper really sees in Renée Zellweger—to blurt, “Who won?” Every parental head on the sidelines whipped around in disbelief.
“Who won?” my fellow soccer mom Wynne asked incredulously, though she should have known by then that I’m not exactly made of killer instincts. For her part the aptly pseudonymed Wynne tracks every last touch and assist. She wants nothing more than a triumphant season. Wants it for her daughter, wants it for herself—hard to say where the former ends and the latter begins among the rabidly competitive parents overrepresented on the sidelines of the high-achieving soccer teams known as “select.”
Where rec teams accept every comer, select teams are filled via competitive tryouts. They feature trained coaches, costlier commitments, and matches in other counties, even states. My kid’s whole team went select a couple seasons ago—sort of a neighborhood-based, farm-team version we parents proudly disparage as “select lite.” So we fancy ourselves a little saner than the neurotically competitive parents we see going red in the face on the sidelines of other select matches.
This season, changes in the select league have left those faces something closer to bloody maroon. Last spring the governing body for soccer in Seattle, the Seattle Youth Soccer Association, reorganized Seattle’s select teams, uniting all the kids from disparate leagues into a single league called Seattle United. SYSA held that the consolidation was meant to unify and streamline—but instead it ignited ferocious controversy among parents who felt that the shift away from the premier select league, the Emerald City Football Club, would compromise their child’s best interests.
The reorg, of course, has gotten the parents even more invested in the matches this season, as they’re now more than athletic contests; they’re proving grounds for parents’ worst fears. And you thought select soccer parents were overinvolved before.
Whether Seattle United will serve my child’s best interests I too am looking to answer. But to be frank—and please don’t tell Wynne I said this—I’m not sure what those best interests are. Sure, we’ve told our kids since they could kick a ball that it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. The reason we have to tell them that in the first place is winning is so obviously the desired end. We’d all rather win than lose. Duh.
But standing on the select sidelines has born in me a startling heresy I’m not keen to say out loud: Winning is not my highest goal for my child.
I’m not talking about excellence here. The skill of her coaches and teammates is why we went select in the first place. But athletic mastery is achievable with hard work in a way that athletic victory only might be. Parents keen on raising goal-oriented children know that winning is a maddening whim of the fates, subject to vagaries that may have nothing to do with work. A teammate’s good night’s sleep. An opponent’s bad burrito.
Published: September 2010
Years ago I helped out a friend to fill a public high school girls jv soccer coaching job. I have played my whole life and thought I could do pretty well at this job. She was varsity coach and I was jv. Now being a jv coach you get a WIDE spectrum of skills… some could be varsity (but get little to no playing time) and most were jv and that’s it, no hope of EVER moving up to varsity.
The girls with better skills, I drove them a bit harder, those with less I encouraged them with positive re-enforcement and made them think about they’re options on and off the ball.
The players on jv (I was told) picked the captains and that’s how it was…. well, I got them to compromise, we each pick one. They picked a popular, outgoing girl and I picked a quiet shy freshman. She came up to me after practice one day and quietly said that she couldn’t do it, she was ONLY a freshman and I should pick someone else who played last year. I listened and told her I understood her position but told her the reason I picked her was A) she was an excellent player and B) You lead by example… don’t goof off, listen intently and give 110% 100% of the time. She accepted and understood. The other reason, which I told her parents later was that I wanted her to break out of her shell and take the lead, show the others the way.
She was an EXCELLENT captain, an EXCELLENT player and a GREAT kid! She moved up to varsity the next season and went on to captain the Varsity team her Senior year. I ran into her dad a handful of years later and he told me that she said I was the most influential “teacher” she had throughout high school.
We went 4-3-3 that first year, and ALMOST all the parents would ask me my secret… (they had only won 3 games total the previous 2 years), my answer….. “It’s a game, I wanted them to have fun playing it.”
My son (8 yrs old) plays now (2 teams and a Skills Development Camp) and I see some of those “agro-parents” and I shake my head. They are going to burn their kids out and they don’t even know it. The day my son doesn’t enjoy playing anymore is the day we move onto something else.
Compliments to Seattle Met for exposing the real competitors in today’s youth soccer: the parents (“A Losing Proposition,” September 2010.) As president of a local soccer club, I witnessed great matches of competitiveness, doggedness and tenacity; and that was just on the sidelines! I finally had to quit, but not before implementing mandatory training for coaches on the psychology of coaching youth athletes by UW Professor of Psychology Dr. Frank Smoll. His seminars have helped tens of thousands of coaches increase self-esteem, reduce performance-destroying anxiety, and decrease drop-out rates. Now if we could increase the drop-out rate of overly-competitive sideline behavior, that would be the best goal of all.
I having been coaching Premier Soccer for many years now and I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ll take it a step further and say that at least one or two kids on every one of these teams is having significant damage being done to them in this atmosphere we’ve created. As one of my fellow coaches says to me often, “Seth, we work in the worst industry in the world. We’re this (holding his thumb and pointer finger close together) close to child prostitution….” Damn right….