Petites' Cleats

My first attempt at athletic stardom came as a fifth-grader when I joined a little League team. By the end of the first week, the coach had convinced my mother that my talents actually equipped me better for softball than baseball. As it turned out, he was mistaken. I was equally ill-suited for softball and languished on the bench much of the season after amassing double digits in both batting average and number of fielding errors.

In the eighth grade, the basketball coach pulled me aside after the second day of a three-day tryout. "You know, Brian," he said, trying to be gentle, "I could really use a good statistician." (A long happy career in sports information was born, but that's another endpaper.)

When, in the fall of 1992, I became assistant coach under Joe Mathews '95 of a Cambridge Youth Soccer Under-10 Boys team, my luck with sports began to change. The Cambridge Elks--later to become the Dragons in an organizational shake-up--have won their division every fall and spring since, amassing a 45-3-2 record and earning a promotion to a top division for our final season, which begins in earnest this month.

After Joe and I graduate in June the Dragons will go their separate ways, but there are always other teams looking for coaches. You can coach children's soccer, too! Here's why you should--even if you've never seen a soccer game in your life.

The Dear Children

Ahh, there's nothing quite like the fresh face of youth, the wide-eyed excitement to face each new challenge, the enthusiasm for personal growth, the curiousity in...

Please. They're a bunch of monsters. But they're our monsters, mind you, and we love them to death. There's Nick, who likes to swing out of trees or monkey bars onto coaches' necks, wrestling them to the ground. Or Jamie, who will randomly lie down on the field during scrimmages and refuse to play. And there's Max--the only player on our team to draw a red card for inappropriate language--who a few weeks ago slipped away from the gym at the school where we were practicing and was caught by a janitor in a (previously locked) third-grade classroom, tearing down posters and overturning desks. He's currently serving a two-week suspension from practice (without pay).

The Leadership Training

If you are privileged, as I have been, to work with an experienced soccer coach like Joe, then you come away understanding much about management techniques and people skills.

From my observations, the key to Joe's getting the kids to do what he wants is yelling. Lots of yelling. I've even gotten pretty good at it myself now. "Don't all stand in the same place! Spread out!" and "Go to the ball!" are old stand-bys. "Quit standing around!," "Take your hands out of your pockets!," and of course, "Antoine, stop running circles around the goal while the ball is in play!" are also big. And the painstakingly grammatical "To whom?!" is sure to follow any errant pass.

The only problem with this might be that yelling from the sidelines is discouraged in youth soccer, whereby traditional coaching is supposed to take place in practice and halftime, not during play. The leadership lesson here: Disregard pointless traditions.

The Thrill of Victory

There's nothing quite like seeing one's favorite group of cocky 11-year-olds put another group of cocky 11-year-olds in its place. This is especially satisfying at games like ours at Wellesley last year. The immaculately groomed Wellesley players, in their perfectly pressed white (of course) uniforms, came out talking a big game against our rag-tag, culturally and ethnically diverse Cambridge team, peppering their trash talk with racial epithets and words like "slum kids." That didn't last long as our "slum kids" handed them their first loss of the season, a shut-out, and went on to beat them again to clinch the league championship.

To experience this thrill, of course, it's important to have a team that's capable of winning. As near as I can tell, you just need talented kids. We certainly have them. Eleven-year-old Anthony, the league MVP for the last two seasons, can now out-play Coach Joe in intra-squad scrimmages. And, as every Harvard pre-med knows, being aggressive certainly helps. Our kids have a reputation around the league for using their 85-pound masses of flesh to bruise, sprain and bloody their opponents. At practice, they rehearse the slide tackles and body blocks on each other.

So how does one get such talented, physical kids? You need a strong front office. We have that in the form of team mother Paula, the PTA officer and school volunteer who scouts out the top athletes and aggressively recruits. Recently, we got Max's mother installed as the league coordinator; we're still seeing how to use that development to our advantage.

If all this sounds a little serious for youth soccer, it's time to wake up and smell the Starbucks. As Joe always says, Vince Lombardi was wrong: Winning is everything. But if we didn't think the kids were really gaining something and developing as people, we wouldn't be coaching. If it still sounds too serious to you, look at the bright side: At least the players haven't formed a union. Rest assured that when they do, and they go on strike, Joe and I will stand united with Sparky Anderson in refusing to coach. Replacements just won't cut it. These kids are irreplaceable.