Winning

We won our first game today and I am way too happy about that than I should be.

Even though I cheer for the other team at a good goal or a good save, I still wanted mine to win. But those girls, a hodegpdoge of kids, they listened to me, and when I told each one that they had done something good, they believed me. I believed me: they were awesome. I love soccer. I love how I get to be when I teach it.

Soccer is a complicated game built for a player with skills of all kinds: the physical, but the mental mostly. It is a game of precision and control, but also a game that anyone can play. I was once moved to tears by this description by Sean Wilsey of World Cup soccer, which I paraphrase and edit here (and for which I hope not to be sued):

"Soccer's universality is its simplicity—the fact that the game can be played anywhere with anything. Urban children kick the can on concrete and rural kids kick a rag wrapped around a rag wrapped around a rag, barefoot, on dirt. Soccer is something to believe in now, perhaps empty at its core, but not a stand-in for anything else.

What makes the World Cup most beautiful is the world, all of us together. The joy of being one of the billion or more people watching 32 countries abide by 17 rules fills me with the conviction, perhaps ignorant, but like many ignorant convictions, fiercely held, that soccer can unite us all."

What an amazing thing to believe, in our wartime especially, that a game can be bigger than its players or the rules. When I read this again, in sharing it here, I was newly inspired: for soccer (obviously), for the kids that play it all over the world, and also for my own simple desire for peace.

Kick the ball, spread out into the places no one is, find a player to pass to, help each other, defend and offend in equal parts, no one scores a goal alone.

Politics, schmolitics. This is what it means to be a soccer mom.