Playing Soccer

I was at a work party with C recently and, after standing in the kitchen eating some appetizers, I said this to her: "The hosts seem like nice people, but her kids definitely play soccer." Here's how I knew:

They fit the soccer player parent demographic perfectly. The hosts were a rich white couple (not Cribs rich, but the kind of rich that makes them refer to themselves as upper middle class even though their combined income puts them in the top 5% of taxpayers.) They also had a clean house and not just “cleaned up before guests arrive” clean, like “not lived-in” clean. The combination of these two things, to me, implies that they would never let their little Dylan or Madison play in a contact sport where their feelings, nevermind their bodies, could be hurt. Hence, soccer is the perfect egalitarian everyone just run around and have fun weak ass sport for their spoiled white kids. Now, American soccer is different from European football where there are elite leagues, training, and discipline. American soccer is mainly played by privileged white kids and South American kids who are waaay better. The parents who have kids that play soccer aren’t bad people; they just insulate their kids to a point where they cannot face any hardships on their own. So, being the over-protective hoverers that they are, they would never think to let little Julian play football, where the coach might yell at them and they might get hurt or they wouldn’t get to play as much as a kid who is better than them. These kind of parents ruin everything because they petition the league commissioner any time a coach has a curt word for their kid or any modicum of discipline is applied to their “precious” or there is one little hazing death. Every parent wants to protect their child, but isn’t the greatest accomplishment a parent could have seeing their child succeed in the real world on their own using what they taught little (insert trendy non-Biblical child name)?

As I see it, when you refer to a white kid as someone who “plays soccer”, you are basically saying he is white, sheltered, slightly out-of-touch with anything that goes on with households earning under $250,000. Again, soccer-player parents aren’t bad people, they are caring, involved, and protective, but to a fault. There are worse things to be I guess (e.g. uninvolved parents, whole other post), but ease up a little. Expose your kids to discipline, competition, life in general because yeah, Kaddy might get into Brown, but she is going to do more LSD than Hunter S. Thompson.

Please note that if this post comes off as macho in a “my kid can kick your kid’s ass” kind of way, it is not meant like that. I find the macho parents to be much worse and often think their standard response to everything of “beat ‘em up” is aggressively ignorant. They tend to force their kids into macho things to toughen them up only leading them to grow up to be quick-tempered angry boors who talk in strictly blue collar clichés…and start the cycle all over again. There are extremes on both ends, but finding a medium approach leads to well-adjusted independent productive members of society like myself. This is also not a putdown of soccer. I played a year of soccer growing up and later football. Soccer just seems to be the sport of choice for the “Lilies”. While soccer may have its better qualities, there is nothing more eye-opening and maturing than your football coach questioning your sexuality after a half-hearted block attempt.

-K