At its best, youth soccer is a place where young boys and girls learn some of the mental toughness, work ethic, and positive mentality necessary to lead successful, fulfilling lives as adults. If your child is able to capitalize on that experience, make life-long friends, inspire and help others, and use their athletic talents to help get a college education, it's all gravy. Anyone who's read my posts on this forum knows I have plenty of criticisms of youth club soccer, but this post is all about the gratitude for what it has given my daughter, and by extension, given us as parents.
Today we're loading up the car and driving my GK to drop her off at college for her freshman year. Under normal circumstances, she would have been on campus already, practicing with the team and eyeing her chance at seeing the field in her first college games. Under normal circumstances, I'd have already posted brags here about how her team finished their final season of club soccer and how awesome her coach and teammates and team parents had been, and how everyone needs to enjoy this time while they can because it's over before you know it. But these aren't normal circumstances. It's been a tough year for everyone. 2020 is not for the faint of heart nor for the rigid of mind. But I would wager that as far as youth soccer goes, the class of '20 has had it worst of all. This is the class that got caught in no-man's land with NCAA recruiting changes. This is the class that endured the birth-year change at the most critical point between youngers and olders, seeing long-standing teams broken up and coaching changes beyond even the normal carousel of club soccer. This is the class that got the brunt of every major league change and destabilizing club moves since the SCDSL broke up the CSL monopoly; ending with the girls DA fiasco. It's been brutal. Losing their graduation, losing prom, losing their goodbyes to their teams and coaches, losing their freshman year experience, losing their freshman soccer seasons for those who went on to potentially play at the next level.
But she's a goalkeeper. This is what she's trained to do. You see the play shifting in front of you; the counter attack is sudden. The shot comes from an unexpected angle; the ball takes a deflection. The ref calls "hand ball" in the box on your defender when the ball clearly hit her upper arm, close to her body. The PK taker feints, comes to a near stop to pull you off the line and goes the other way. You react and make the save, but the ref blows the whistle and gives them a re-take because someone ran into the box too early. The ball goes in the net. It's not fair. But you can't dwell on that. You have to erase it. Make the next play. See the next shot. Make the next save.
She's a goalkeeper. She knows what losing feels like. She knows getting beat. She knows what it's like to put in 2x the practice time because you're expected to make every team practice and every club GK workout AND do private training on your own. She knows what it's like to get yanked in the middle of a game for a bad play; to get cut from the team. Been there done that. Knocked to the ground. Trampled. Kicked in the head. And always getting back up.
She's a goalkeeper. Goalkeepers don't get the glory... not often, anyway. But that's okay. She doesn't do it for the glory. She does it because everyone depends on her to do her job, and do it well at all times, to never let up, and she likes it that way.
She's a goalkeeper. Goalkeepers react to things that are outside of their control, and do everything in their power to get it back under their control. Goalkeepers have to be the most resilient, most mentally tough players on the field. And never has there been a time in our lives that required more resilience, more mental toughness.
I'm bragging today on my kid today, not because she's a stud athlete who got recruited to play college soccer, or got a scholarship, or because she was an ODP selection, or because she played in a national elite league, or won National Cup or Surf Cup, or worked as an intern using soccer as an outreach to underprivileged girls in another country in her off seasons, or raised $2000 in donations to provide equipment for those girls, or because she played on the "A" team, or won a PK shoot-out. I'm bragging on her because she lost her first 10 club soccer games by an average score of 11-1, got cut, got demoted to the "B" team, got pulled in a big game for letting in howlers, got trampled, kicked in the head, lost numerous PK shootouts, lost tournaments, lost playoff games, was overlooked by college coaches for months while her teammates committed to school after school, and then lost her entire final season, her prom, and her graduation to COVID19, and
and still accomplished all of that above. She is a bright, shining hope for the future, and it simultaneously breaks my heart to lose her irrepressible presence in our house, and fills it with joy to see her step between the goal posts on the field of life. And even if she never sets foot on a soccer field again, I'll be forever grateful for everything that the game, her teammates, and especially her coaches have given her to help prepare her for this crazy, unpredictable, sometimes ugly, and sometimes beautiful, life.
Thanks to everyone on this forum (except one or two who will go unnamed
) for all your encouragement and knowledge and guidance. I'll do my best to pay it forward to the newbies.
