Stepping into Their Cleats

Now that school is back in session, the soccer fields throughout College Park are once again full of young athletes practicing their soccer, football and field hockey skills, and for almost every young athlete there is a parent sitting on the sideline cheering.

These are parents who love their children, who want to be a part of their lives and who want to give them the opportunity to succeed at a sport.

One evening this week, as I sat watching my daughter play her first high school scrimmage, I listened to parents along the sidelines yelling directions to their girls, telling them to shoot, pass, push up, spread out.  I watched as the girls looked over at the sidelines, rolled their eyes and went on their way.

Being a parent is hard. Letting our children grow, letting them make mistakes and learn from those mistakes is counterintuitive to our very natures.

But on a soccer pitch, a football field or a baseball diamond, this is exactly what they need. They need to make the mistakes and learn from those mistakes. 

Beyond this though is a fact that few of us want to face. Our children are better than we are at their sports. Unless we are playing their sport as often as they are, unless we are practicing two or more times a week and have done so for the past eight years, like most of the girls on my daughter's team today, we cannot do what they do.

Once I accepted this fact, I learned to be quiet on the sideline. I learned to let the coach yell directions. I learned to let my child make her own mistakes and not judge her when she did.  I became more relaxed and the games became more enjoyable.

For me, accepting the fact didn’t take long. After a couple of conversations with other parents who were equally directive from the sidelines, several of us made the decision to give the game a try ourselves.

Because I had never played the game, I was pretty sure I had nothing on my daughter.  But still I gave it a go.  I let my daughter take me in the front yard and give me a 30-minute tutorial.

After of trying to juggle the ball the way my daughter does, trying to shoot the ball toward the goal that always looks so big from the sideline or even just trying to pass the ball in a straight line, I realized I was not a soccer player and any directions from me during a game were likely to be the wrong directions.

For my husband it took longer.  Because he had played the game and felt like he really knew the game, he decided to join an adult league.  Like me, my husband is a marathoner.  He is in good shape, and he knew, logically anyway, that the running on a soccer pitch was different from the running he does on a daily basis.

But he was shocked by the effort it took to back and forth, think about what the next play would be and change direction to make that move.  Within a couple of games, he became much quieter on the sidelines.

Putting ourselves out on the pitch, accepting the same pressures that our kids face each and every game, opened our eyes to exactly how much effort goes into the game.

Suddenly we found ourselves appreciating the work our daughter puts into a game. Suddenly, the mistakes she makes during games doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.