The Bad News Bears of Soccer

It makes me laugh when my online friends say something about how athletic I am.

If you have met me IRL, you'd never call me an athlete. I walk pigeon toed and I am always sporting a shiny new bruise from running into something random. I'm terrible at sports. Well, besides Wii tennis. But that's neither here nor there.

I was pondering my lack of athleticism recently and started thinking about how it started way back when. In third grade, I decided that I wanted to play soccer. My dad signed me up and when he asked who the coach was, the man in charge of sign-ups told us that they couldn't find one. There was already one established team, but all the newbies would start a new one. The man asked my dad if he was interested in coaching this team, but my dad declined. He'd played soccer his whole life, but had never coached. After downright begging and my dad sticking to his guns, the sign-up man asked my dad just to take the equipment to the first practice, where there, he could hand it off to the coach.

Fast forward to the first practice...my dad was left, holding the mesh bag of soccer balls, and no one showed. My super sweet dad couldn't turn down all of us 8-year-old girls waiting for our very!first!soccer practice! And really, how hard could coaching 8-year-olds be, right?

Wrong.

First of all, all of the other teams had three years of experience under their belts. Three years to practice, and therefore avoid jumping over the ball in the middle of a game. Three years to learn the rules and therefore avoid picking up the ball in the middle of the field. Three years to perfect their skills and therefore avoid missing every.single.opportunity.for a goal. I can still hear my dad screaming, "Shooooooot! Shooooooooot!" Apparently, we attempted to dribble the ball into the goal every single time rather than taking a shot.

In other words, we sucked. Badly.

We were the girls who were braiding each other's hair during the game. On the field.

We were the girls who got beat 14 to 0. More than once.

We were the girls who didn't have a consistent goalie. No one wanted to play keeper; in fact, several girls sobbed when my dad put them in goal. Big huge, little-girl tears.

Our team was a hot mess.

But my ever-cheery father always high-fived us after every game and said, "Did you have fun?"

We'd smile and answer affirmatively, and he'd invariably answer, "That's all that matters."

But we played week in and week out without scoring a single goal. After a year, my dad bought a shiny new soccer ball and carried it in his trunk. He'd get it out and set it on the bleachers at every game, explaining that the first girl who scored a goal would get the beautiful new ball.

And every week, he'd sigh, putting it back in his trunk.

That ball went two and a half seasons back and forth. The box was all crumpled and the ball wasn't quite so shiny anymore.

And then, one fateful day, one of my teammates, by some miracle, actually shot the ball.

And made it.

The crowd went wild. We screamed. We jumped. We high-fived. Finally, we lined back up to start a new play. A girl on the other team disdainfully said, "Why are you guys freaking out? We are still beating you 10-1."

Yet I still remember how good that goal felt.

It didn't compare to our first win, though. We had been playing for five and a half years and were actually getting good.

Well.

When I say good, I mean that we were getting beat by single digit numbers and consistently scoring a goal or two each game.

And then it happened. We were tied for most of the game, and right before it ended, we scored the game winning goal.

Stop. The. World.

There were only a few minutes left, but they seemed to take hours.

When those final whistles blew, we went nuts. We were freaking out...jumping up and down and hugging Moms were crying. Heck, dads were crying.

My dad's a videographer, and on our highlight video at the end of that year, the song that accompanied the footage from that game was "Almost Paradise," from Footloose.

Two and a half years without a goal. Five and a half without a win. And I was a key player in our record.

Athletic, I am not.

But now you know where I get my stubbornness, determination, and willingness to believe in miracles.

And my soft spot for the underdogs.