Meanwhile, at the youth soccer game…

By Country-Fried Mama

The sun sets slowly behind The Piggly Wiggly.  Across a four-lane road clogged with rush-hour traffic, a dozen three- and four-year-olds gather on a dusty field.  Clothed in new cleats, heavy socks, too-long shirts and varying degrees of disinterest, the kids eye each other, their coaches and the goals.  These final things appear to be important to all the grown-ups, but few of the players seem to understand why.

This is youth soccer.

After much cajoling, each team offers up five players.  One player sits in the dirt, his hands folded in his lap.  Another is crying.  A tiny boy in an enormous, shiny shirt fiddles with his sunglasses.  Two girls at midfield discover, gleefully, they are wearing identical shoes.  A coach blows a whistle to capture everyone’s attention and ask an important question before the game begins.

“Where’s your goal?”

The kids avoid eye contact. My daughter strokes her chin thoughtfully.  Another child stares off at the slow-moving traffic at the edge of the field.  One of the more reluctant players wanders off the field toward his mother.

“Your goal is over there, folks,” the coach says.  He is clearly skilled in the game – a font of soccer strategy.

As play finally begins, my husband and I notice our child is quite a runner.  Her teammate kicks the ball forward, and Miss D. drops back, runs in a wide arc around the knot of kids surrounding the ball, then dashes out ahead of them.  Aside from a couple of moments when her coach invites her to kick from the sidelines, Miss D. never touches the ball.  But she runs.  Hard.

After half-time, Miss D. is still running, this time toward me to gasp for water.  It’s 83 degrees at 6:30 in the evening, and Miss D.’s soccer uniform covers most of her body.  Her face is red.  She takes a drink, then sprints back to the game, turning around to give us a thumbs up.  She high-fives her coach, then continues with her strategy to run circles around the ball, making sure to never, ever kick it.

A couple of the kids turn out to be pretty good, and each team scores a goal or two.  Miss D.’s team scores at least one goal against itself.  At the end, none of the kids asks who won, and I’m almost certain none of the adults knows.

The parents gather on the field in two lines facing each other, arms outstretched to form a tunnel.  The kids run through, and we cheer them as they pass.  Miss D. looks confused, but when I find her afterward, she smiles.

It’s a relief to see her smile.  After all, her daddy and I spent most of the game screaming, “Kick it!  Kick the ball!  Miss D.!  Kiiiiiiick it!”  We clearly lost our minds in under an hour and turned into the types of horror-show parents we would have scorned and judged in our previous lives before kids.

Miss D. doesn’t appear to be scarred by our enthusiasm; at least, not yet.

“I like soccer,” she tells me in the car.

“I’m so glad, sweetie.  What do you like about it?”

“I really, really like the running,” she says.

And if her little, pink cleats never touch that ball all season, that answer leaves me satisfied.

Country-Fried Mama is a transplanted Yankee raising two girls in the land of college football, sweet tea, and refined manners. Visit her blog at www.countryfriedmama.com and follow her on Twitter @countryfried.