The Beautiful Game

When my kids were in kindergarten, I started coaching their soccer teams through the local recreation department. I love soccer. Loved playing it as a kid, then in college, then out in Colorado, and for one summer on a ragtag team of women from teenaged to middle-aged in Ireland. So of course I loved coaching it, too. It was gratifying to see the kids – my own and their classmates – progress from kindergarten all the way through elementary school, at which point I moved to the spectating side of the field.

It was a bit of a bummer last fall when my youngest and her classmates missed out on their last year of rec soccer – and their last chance to vie for the coveted Halloween Cup, that annual end-of-the-season tournament, played on the home field, right next to the playground they’ve all been swinging and sliding and climbing through since they were toddlers. My friend Mike and I still got to coach the kids in practices and intrateam scrimmages, but it wasn’t quite the same without the competition of playing against other teams. And while I sympathized with the kids, I also felt a twinge of my own remorse for missing out on this last year of coaching.

Still, I hesitated this spring when I was asked to help with my youngest daughter’s club team. Just having two of my kids playing spring soccer was a big time commitment, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to add one more thing to my plate. But in the end, I figured if I was going to be sitting at practices and driving to games anyway, I may as well help out – as long as I didn’t have to be in charge of planning practices or any of the administrative stuff. Basically, I agreed to be there to follow someone else’s lead.

In all the years I’ve coached (both soccer and skiing) I’ve been lucky to have some strong leads to follow. I’ve learned from the people I’ve coached with – and from watching many of the coaches who have guided my kids’ athletic endeavors when I’m on the other side of the field (or the ski slope) with the spectators.

This spring’s coaching experience was different than coaching fall soccer. Many of the kids, I met for the first time in April, when we started kicking the ball around inside. Some of them I knew from two years ago – pre Covid – when they’d first played on the same team with my daughter. The only one I’d known since kindergarten was my own. One of the perks of coaching, though, is that you get to know the kids differently than when you’re a parent on the sideline. And this group of girls was super fun to get to know. They are silly while still being competitive. Smart. Sometimes a little sassy. Tough. And supremely coachable.

Scott, whose lead I got to follow this spring, is one of those coaches who has an innate ability to connect with players. If you’ve ever had a good coach, you’ll know what I mean here. They exude good energy. They’re almost always positive. They expect you to play to your potential and will tell you – in a constructive way – when you can do better. When you have a coach like that, you always try your hardest, always want to play more, play better.

These girls worked hard and had fun through the season, whether it was 90 degrees and oppressively humid or 45 and raining. Girls who early in the season told me they simply couldn’t kick the ball with their left foot were, by June, making defensive clears, attacking crosses, and even a goal or two – with that left foot. Girls who had been timid during the first games became confident. Girls who hardly knew each other off the field somehow connected on it – learning which passes to send and which runs to make and how to work together.

Sometimes, on the sidelines during games, we coaches meted out tactical advice. Often, we just watched the girls play and relished their love of the game. Who knows where soccer might lead them? Onto a high school team, maybe, or even college. To a team in a Colorado ski town, or a village in the west of Ireland. Perhaps, someday, these girls will be on the coaching side of the field, guiding the next group of youngsters through the beautiful game.

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's July 1, 2021 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.

Soccer Lessons

Remember that feeling, I told my daughter Saturday afternoon. The one of elation that came after you buried the shot and were mobbed by happy, screeching teammates. Remember that one as much as the other one: the sad disappointment of landing on the wrong side of a hard loss. Both are important.

The first time I ended up in a dog pile of happy, screeching teammates I was a freshman in college, and my soccer team had beaten a tough rival. I don’t remember the import of that game, but I’ll always remember that feeling of pure, adrenaline-fueled joy and the camaraderie that comes with being part of a team celebrating in a grass-stained, sweaty heap. That was the same season we lost to another close rival on penalty kicks. Our last shooter was our senior captain – a four-time all-American and steady as they come – and she launched the ball well over the cross-bar, sending our hopes of defending the national title with it.

You win as a team, you lose as a team. And doing either by penalty kicks is a pretty awful way to end a game. But it’s a lot less awful when you win. It took me until college to learn that lesson. Our girls, mostly aged 10 and 11, learned it during Saturday’s annual Halloween Cup after a series of five games where they dominated play – but still ended up without the coveted candy-filled trophy.

We tell our kids – in sports and school and friendships and life – to give it their all, do their best, try their hardest, and good things will come. But sometimes you can do all that and still end up on the losing end. Sometimes you don’t make the team. Sometimes the best team doesn’t win. As country music icon Mary Chapin Carpenter put it in a song: sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.

Our girls were feeling utterly squashed after the last ball was kicked Saturday. They’d played all day with grit and heart, allowing only a few shots and no goals against them through three regular games, a semi-final, and the championship match. Yet, after a scoreless overtime and a tied first round of penalty kicks, it was the other team celebrating the win, and ours left stunned and teary-eyed.

My coaching partner and I have played a lot of soccer. We’ve felt the highs of winning big games and the lows of tough losses, and we love the game through it all. We told the girls we were proud of them, to hold their heads high, but our eyes brimmed with emotion, too, behind our sunglasses. It’s one thing to go through the disappointment of losing; it’s something else entirely to watch your kids and their teammates feel a loss so deeply.

My freshman year of high school, my team won a single game all season. But I loved soccer, loved playing, loved the team, wanted to get better. A year later, I was cut from the first club team I tried out for. I’d wanted to be on that team badly, and I was devastated. But I got back out there, practiced even harder, kept playing, and made that team the next season.

If I hadn’t been cut and felt that disappointment, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to get better, and I wouldn’t have made it onto the team the next year. Without that team, I wouldn’t have had a chance of playing in college. I would have missed a lot of soccer highs.

I was reminded after Saturday’s shootout of another, similar outcome two years ago, when another team of Lafayette girls made the finals and lost on penalty kicks. After a game like that, all you can do is cry a little, then get up and move on to the next thing. Keep practicing, keep trying, keep playing.

The girls from that game two years ago just completed an undefeated season of middle school soccer. I’d bet most of them can reach back in their young memories and recall the disappointment of coming so close to winning their own Halloween Cup, only to be defeated on the last kick. And I’d bet they all have other memories, happier ones, of scoring goals and winning games and celebrating together.

I wish I had a photograph of my daughter in that moment after she made the goal and turned around with an exhilarated leap to face her cheering teammates. I wish I had a photograph of all the girls at the end of every other game that day, when their smiles were proud and happy, when they were at the high end of emotion. Perhaps the best part of being a coach – at any level, with any sport – is seeing that look on the face of someone who has worked hard, made a breakthrough, seen effort transformed into some form of victory.

I don’t know how long these girls will play soccer, but I hope it’s many more seasons. I hope they keep playing, keep learning, keep loving the game. I hope they work through the lows to reach the highs. I hope along the way they all end up in a few grass-stained, sweaty, exuberant, celebratory heaps on the field. And I hope that’s the feeling they remember best.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the October 24, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.