Chris Carlisle

I volunteered to coach my coach my five-year-old daughter’s soccer team this fall.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  To volunteer means to freely give one’s time, and technically that’s not what happened here.  Sure, I am giving my time to coach my daughter’s team, an unpaid position, but the means by which I became her team’s coach was not as simple as “volunteering” for the job might sound.

My wife volunteered me for the position. I was wifenteered.

(Checked Google. No entries yet for Wifenteer. A new word is born!)

If there’s one thing I have in common with a five-year-old (besides watching at least two hours of cartoons each day), it’s that neither of us have any idea whatsoever about how the game of soccer is played.  Sure it involves a ball and lots of kicking, but I figured there had to be more to it than that.

I went as far as to DVR a soccer games to see if I could glean any information from watching how the pros play it. The best I could tell when watching the playback (at 15x normal speed), it really is just a bunch of kicking the ball around with the occasional rolling around on the turf grabbing your ankle.

Since I volunteered (read: wifenteered) to educate these young minds on the sport, I decided the best course of action was to attend the league sanctioned training session to learn more about the game.  This was a clinic put on by actual soccer professionals who’ve spent most of their lives playing and coaching the sport.

I learned three very important things at this training:

1.Soccer at it’s purest form is a mind-numbingly boring sport that will not hold a five-year-old’s attention longer than 20 seconds.

2.The only way to keep a five-year-old interested in playing soccer longer than 20 seconds is to trick him into thinking he’s not playing soccer.

3.Arrange for snacks at the end of each practice as a reward to help keep the kids interested.

Although the drills I learned at the coaching clinic dealt with soccer related moves and techniques, none of the drills actually made any reference to the sport of soccer.  Rather than learn how to score goals, we played the “Eggs in the Nest” game, where the balls were eggs and that the goal was the nest.  Instead of learning to dribble, we played the “Don’t Wake the Snake” game, where the players had to dribble their ball through an obstacle course without touching any of the cones (i.e. the snake).  Instead of learning how to pass the ball, we played the “Vaccinate the SARS Infected Monkey” game where we, well, that one’s pretty much self-explanatory.

After learning these drills, it’s not surprising any more that many soccer games end in a 0-0 tie.  Odds are good that no one in the history of the sport was ever taught how to score a goal.   Everyone’s too busy trying not to wake the snake that they forget to put the eggs in the nest.

My hopes aren’t high that my team will score many goals this season, but at this point in their development as soccer players, it’s less about winning and losing and more about tricking them into playing the game.

Although we’re not counting wins and losses, I do have one goal for my team to accomplish this year.  I fully expect all of my players will be using euphemisms on a 4^th grade level by the end of the season.  If that happens, it will be well worth my wifenteered time.

(Sorry to disappoint, but there are no snacks this week.  It was your mother’s turn and she forgot to bring them. Maybe next week.)