Fear & Loathing at a Youth Soccer Tournament: A Dad's Diary

Pre-order Soccer Dad by David Murray here.

Author’s Note: When my daughter was about 13, I accompanied her and an all-star team from Chicago to the Target USA Cup. That's the biggest youth soccer tournament in the U.S. But it’s also a lot like every soccer tournament in the U.S. So I kept a diary. Here are some glimpses, unvarnished by the nostalgic mists of memory:

Monday.

It’s 7:30 the evening before the tournament, and at the Radisson hotel bar, many of the parents are already stiff.

Which would be fine if we did not have a responsibility tonight, but we do.

No, it’s not “parenting” our soccer girls, who we glimpse only occasionally. Far from monitoring our drinking, the girls will regard us for the duration of the week as hangers-on—pathetic youth soccer groupies, to be graciously but briskly acknowledged at accidental elevator encounters and grudgingly relied upon for rides to the fields.

It’s like being invisible, being a parent at a teenage soccer tournament. And that is like being free.

No, our responsibility tonight is memorizing the names of all the parents and kids on this ersatz all-star team we’re a part of for this event. Because this tournament is a whole week long, and by God, I will not spend another week on the sidelines like I spent last summer, pretending to know which kid belongs to which parents, and being pretended to. That’s why I’m filling the flimsy hotel notepads with the names of the fifteen sets of parents and girls.

Tuesday. 

A 3–1 loss to an established team from Minnesota sees our right forward on the sideline with an ankle injury, our striker carted off with a knee injury, and our left forward, my daughter, weirdly gasping and heaving from some combination of dehydration and overwrought frustration.

It isn’t long before the parents are back in the Radisson lobby, drinking again.

What are we drinking for, beyond relieving the awkwardness of meeting quirky grown-ups for the first time, none of whom will ever divulge the real reason they’re here? (Division I scholarships dance in our heads.)

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink.

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies. 

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies out of Solo cups.

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies out of Solo cups with people you know you’ll only ever know casually.

And we’re drinking because we are all sad—and we all know we share this deep and deepening grief, though it’s rarely spoken directly—that our little girls aren’t our little girls anymore.

Tonight I took the Radisson’s one working elevator up at 1:30 a.m., and the lobby party wasn’t over yet.

The next afternoon’s opponent is from Canada, the only international squad in our bracket group. We’d better begin hydrating now—all of us.

Wednesday.

After a mostly inept first half, the team comes out with renewed energy in the second, and my daughter has two assists in a 2–0 victory. With a win tomorrow, they’ll likely advance into the playoff brackets.

Meanwhile, I’ve done in a couple days what used to take me whole seasons: identified the parents who I can stand—and developed methods for enduring the parents I can’t. I’ve amused the parents by making up nicknames for a few of the girls. A girl named Gill is “Gill the Thrill.” A defender named Eleanor is now “Give ’Em Hell-eanor.”

Thursday.

This afternoon our team came back from a 2–0 deficit to forge a tie. But the effort was deemed unsatisfactory. By the parents, viewing from our lawn chairs.

To know how insane this whole travel-soccer phenomenon has made us, you need only be on the sideline for one bad game.

The heretofore positive, supportive parents decide within moments of the first goal scored against our girls that the referees are at once blind and biased, the coaches have not the foggiest idea what they’re doing, the team has no chemistry nor leadership, and the players have neither the skill nor the desire to compete, as the phrase inevitably goes, “at this level.”

In our mob narcissism, the opposing team never gets any credit for their exceptional play or effort—the very credit we lavish on our girls after a victory. And it never occurs to any of us that teenage girls bring varying energy and differing moods on different days. (As do NFL football teams and NBA basketball teams, as a matter of fact.)

Inevitably, the grumbling begins about how far we’ve driven, how much time we’ve taken off work, and how much money we’ve spent, only to have the girls perform this way. We are disgusted.

The girls are spared some of this utterly bogus energy, which most of us try to keep to ourselves—but surely nowhere close to all of it.

What, for the love of God, is wrong with us?

Friday.

Yes, Friday.

A spirited effort in the morning earned our club a 3–1 victory. After a Panera lunch and a rest at the hotel, back to the fields for a 5:00 game in a hot wind, against a club from Edina, Minn.—a team that, the sideline whispers said, has its own stadium with a Jumbotron screen.

At the end of regulation, the game is tied 2–2, and goes to penalty kicks. Each team makes its first eight. Their goalie stops our ninth, and the game is over—and, for us, the tournament, too.

The girls are sobbing. Most of the parents can see the bright side.

On Saturday morning, a long, rainy, and quiet ride back to life without an artificial Quest for Glory. And also a life where, as I actually declared to my daughter at one point this week, “I am not just the jackass who drives you around!”

And still.

“Seeing the bond these girls developed has been more than I could have hoped for,” a parent organizer wrote afterward in a note to all the parents, who will inevitably agree, from all our hearts.

However decadent and depraved they may be, these are the good old days.

Pre-order Soccer Dad by David Murray here.