>Soccer Shocker

>We were looking at the video of Punky’s first soccer game yesterday, giggling at the moment when she burst into tears and ran off the field and then fast forwarding to the time she kicked the ball in slow motion around all the statue-like members of the other team and proceeded unchallenged right on to the goal (where she kicked the ball out of bounds, consarn it). Ah, the laughs this will provide one day when she’s a member of the US Women’s Soccer Team’s starting line-up…

But watching the video, we began laughing just as hard at something I didn’t even notice while I was shooting it- the parents. You can’t see them, but you can hear them standing beside me, shouting at their three-year-old daughters who are busy examining large leaves and skipping in circles and running the wrong way on the field.

“Focus on the ball, Jessamyn!” the mom beside me keeps shouting at her daughter. “Focus! On! The ball!”

Now come on. Is that really the kind of thing to yell at a three-year-old? How many three-year-olds even understand what focus means?

After being down by two goals five minutes into the game, a light bulb clicked on in the mind of our oldest player, a five-year-old. Like a miniature robot, she began running to the ball and kicking it until she knocked it into the goal, while the other team watched helplessly or simply practiced forward rolls and cartwheels on the grass. I got video of little Chloe scoring what was perhaps her eighth goal, and you can distinctly hear a dad beside me screaming at the opposing team, “For God’s sake! Do something! Try to stop her! Will you just try?!” He was beside himself.

Maybe I should have said something, but I was still reeling from the white-hot rage that had enveloped me after the other team had scored the first goal of the game. As the parents cheered, I’d had a frightening urge to turn and hurl the contents of my Kool-Aid Jammer in their faces. “You and your little brats can stuff it!” I whispered under my breath. Obviously, I’m really not in a position to come down on parents for taking the three-year-old league too seriously.

But as much as I hate to admit it, Punky’s too young to be playing soccer. Hubs and I have murmured this sad fact to each other over and over again, from the time I put her jersey over her head and it went to her ankles, to her first practice when she refused to do a “get the ball from the ogre” drill because she said it was scaring her, to her first game, of which she spent a good half in my lap.

I keep her on the team because, well, mainly because it’s free, since Hubs is coaching. But also, I tell myself it’s a good opportunity for our little computer and book-loving girl to get a bit more physical and enjoy a good two hours a week running around on a field with other kids her age. She may never score a goal, but that shouldn’t matter, right?

Tell that to the mom I saw making the rounds after the game, apologizing to the other parents for her own daughter’s lack of interest in scoring. “We are going to be working with her next week on this,” she kept saying as she made her way from one parent to the next. “She will be here next week ready to score.”

Oh my lord.

And just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, we got a call this morning that another player is joining our team. Her mom is hoping that joining a soccer team will help her daughter who, she says, is not adjusting well to their move here from Florida ten days ago.

Oh, and by the way? She’s two.

It’s going to be one hell of a season.