Opinion

EXPAT LIFE – just what is it?

Put simply, it’s a regular column featuring several of our esteemed columinists giving their views, for better or for worse, on life in America.  This week: Warren Pease on AYSO soccer moms – and dads

I started coaching AYSO soccer four  years ago because I simply couldn’t bear the thought of my little boy taking football instruction from a Yank.

I needn’t have worried. The Santa Monica chaper of AYSO is a smorgasbord of foreigners – English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Iranian, Mexican, Brazilian, Polish, Italian, you name it. Without the local immigant community the S.M. AYSO simply could not exist. I was hardly daunted by the fact I was never much of a player myself. Like almost everyone else of my generation I played every day in the playground at lunch and frequently stayed after school too. I was desperate to get better – at leat until the age of fourteen when reality kicked in – because I could see my lack of ability was such a disappointment to my father. He had enjoyed a brief professional career between the wars for a big London club until his hopes were cut short by a career-ending cartlidge injury. Indeed, the wound never really healed – his left kneecap was always swollen to almost double the size of his right, and I  would frequently horrify my school chums over our London flat for what we would now call a playdate by resting their hands on the offending kneecap while my father flexed it. The cracks, the crunching, the movement underhand were sure to make any schoolboy squeal.

     But I digress, I stopped playing at about 16 and apart from the odd summer kickabout near my college dorm with my fellow students, I haven’t played since. And for a long period after coming to Los Angeles in 1984 I hardly watched the game either, apart the odd early morning at the Cock & Bull or the Scotland Yard for a World Cup game. But the glorious coming of the Fox Soccer Channel to Adelphia Cable meant that I’ve enjoyed  a more or less consistent diet of the beautiful game for the past six or seven years. And by the time my son was born, I was determined to turn him into the next Michel Platini.

     Sadly, genes are destiny, as a wise man once said, and my darling son, for all his charm, has sadly inherited the skills of his father rather than those of his grandfather. In his first game, a U-6 match on a co-ed team, he flattered to deceive by scoring into an empty net within the first minute. He then spent the rest of the game chasing butterflies. To date that is the only goal he has ever scored in AYSO. Of that team of four boys and four girls, he probably came in about number five. When he lamented that all the boys were better than him I encouraged him – in my outdated, chauvinistic way - with the news that he was probably better than any of the girls he was likely to face.

     How wrong I was. Within thirty seconds of kickoff of his second game he was robbed of the ball by a speedy and aggressive girl named Ruby who seemed to make it her job to humiliate him for the rest of the game. She tackled him perhaps three or four times, danced past him with ease when she had the ball and seemed to score goals at will. He trudged off the pitch, dejected at the final whilstle and even now, four years later, he hates that name.

     The season continued in much the same way; we won some, we lost some, and my son never again scored – or even came close. And he didn’t really feel like he was contributing anything to the team. And there was nothing I could do to make him change his mind.

     The season after that was worse.  Because his team had a couple of players how had clearly progressed since the year before, while he was, if anything even worse.  This time I voluntarily demoted myself to assistant coach to serve under a veteran local coach to learn what I could.  We had a team with a couple of standoutplayers, and a couple of determined but limited plodders. And then we had my son. Intimidated. Lacking in confidence.  And bereft of the skills, speed or strength to feel better than anyone else on the pitch. Thanks to the our coach, my skills got better, fast. Sadly my son’s did not. One day walking back from yet another game where the team had prospered but my son had played absymally, my hectoring got too much for him and for he burst into tears. Cue the father epiphany. Cue the frank talk with my wife about me not coaching anymore. And cue my daughter walking in with a ball under her arm asking me for a kickabout in the back yard.

     Two years later, I’m still coaching. My daughter has enjoyed a year in the U-6 and U-8 and is always one of the best players on the field. She is quick, ruthless in front of goal, and possessed of that uncanny undertanding on the field (at least at this age) of where the ball is going, rather than where it’s just been. I’ll be coaching her for one more turn in the U-8 ranks; if she wants to play after that, she can find a real coach.

     Which brings me to the AYSO parents. When I started this column the aim was to recount  some of the many stories – funny and hair-raising - that I’ve gathered during my four seasons teaching the game to Santa Monica tykes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve ended up talking about just one AYSO parent – me.

     I promise I’ll do better next time.