Soccer Stories
“You’re all just a bunch of English hooligans”
I’m a quiet creature with isolated habits. When I was a kid, for extracurriculars, I was enrolled in a few things, sporadically, including ballet, soccer, Embers (née: Brownies), and karate, but I didn’t stick with any one thing for longer than a couple years. By the time I was a teenager in high school, most of my free time was devoted to my studies, my part-time job, dreaming and laughing with my friends, and writing very bad fan fiction.
I was only in soccer for one summer, but the motions and routines stuck with me: lacing up, sweaty shins, how the sky looks rolling over the green, the smell of the grass and sun, the banana-popsicle treat from Becker’s convenience store afterwards. I was a terrible player, and getting hit hard in the head and stomach by the ball one game pretty well turned me off forever, but I think summer soccer is a formative time for Canadian youth.
I’m on the other side of it now, as a Mum, with the snacks, and the water bottles, and the diaper bag full of activities to survive said outings, and I’ve come to understand some things as a casual observer over the years.
Young boys have a reckoning in-between the goalie posts. There is enormous responsibility in assuming the pinny and gloves, and I’ve seen many a fledgling wee man break under the yoke of expectation to do his team proud. Like a landslide, he’ll let one ball in, two balls in, and beg to be released from the keep, but his parent and coach will fortify him, and his team will applaud him regardless of the outcome, and I think this is enormously character building for later years when things get shitty and you have to keep tending your goals, on-and-off the soccer field.
Referees are a strange component. Here you have a youth not much older than the children playing, getting paid a pittance for having to make judicial calls based on an accepted rulebook that sometimes conflicts with the understanding of the coaches and parents. Law and order is a teenager with a whistle, just like at a pool; kids carve summer order.
The soccer fields are wastelands where you come as you are, exposed to the elements, without access to shelter or plumbing or support. There are no washrooms at the soccer fields. Even if there were temporary portable toilets erected on the North field and the South field for the purpose of serving the multiple fields during the multiple games for the season all summer long, they will inevitably be gone when your son shits himself mid-game, forcing you to change and clean him (best you can; diaper wipes are clutch) in a remote corner of the parking lot (because the school is locked), tossing the soiled underwear into the bin (luckily there was one; the unmentionables are beyond saving), because the soccer fields are wastelands, decorated with discarded, decaying orange rinds, stroller tire tracks and cleat imprints, and the memories of a summer spent chasing the ball on the green under the vast blue of the sky with the friends you’ve made in the process.
Sometimes I wish I had stuck with a sport long enough to do well with it, achieve that female athletic camaraderie that is dear and powerful and transformative. Pump up my gams, grow adept at braidwork, travel across province and country, attend banquets and receive medals, raise trophies, sync cycles, and sweat, shower, succeed. Maybe even get good enough at something that I could use for a full or partial scholarship to apply towards undergrad studies. But I didn’t, so I’ll content myself with writing about it, as I continue paying off my student loan.