ii - Day 02 – Your first love, in great detail

It was called the Barrhaven Soccer Club, and we were introduced when I was 6 or 7 years old.  I can't say why my parents felt the need to sign me up for an organised sport, or why they picked soccer (OK, I can guess at the reasons for that last part: it was a relatively inexpensive summer activity which didn't involve 6AM ice time), but they did, and it was the start of a relationship that would go on to deeply affect me for decades.

For most of the eighties, I'd wait eagerly for spring to come around, because on top of the usual school kid's yearning for summer break, it also meant I'd get to chase a ball around a grass field for an hour and a half every week, plus practice time.  I got to be pretty good compared to the other kids, probably because I really liked doing it, helped along by the fact that I had a competitive streak.

Speaking of which, it served, often in retrospect, to help me learn about myself.  It really brought out the competitiveness in my nature.  Not a win at all costs sort of mentality, but more a determination to do everything I could to make sure my team won.  I'll also say proudly that it's where I learned that my natural tendency is not (or perhaps, was not) to half-ass things.  I remember breaking down in tears one year when my coach gave me a defensive assignment against a boy who'd undergone a serious growth spurt and outweighed me by a good twenty or thirty pounds.  I couldn't possibly imagine shirking my responsibility and given that the kid had already run roughshod over me twice in the game, the inevitable conclusion was that I'd be maimed horrifically in the execution of my duties.  As far as I recall, my coach found it endearing, and after giving me a heartfelt pep talk and a big clap on the back, sent me out to get run over by a kid twice my size for another thirty minutes.  Oddly, I don't have any negative feelings about that particular coach.

I should probably say here that I loved scoring goals.  In an unhealthy, completely unbalanced sort of way.  It really shouldn't make any well adjusted individual feel that good.  Not that I can ever really remember doing it.  The only goal I remember ever scoring was when I was in my first year of high school.  I was one of two juniors called up to the senior squad (an achievement in itself, one of the guys on the team was invited to try out for the local semi-pro team right out of high school), I got a pity sub in our final game of the season, the regional quarter finals.  I was only on the field for about 5 minutes, but I was the only one on our team who managed to score, and we lost 2-1.  On the Official List of Most Satisfying Experiences, if #1 is tricking convincing my wife to marry me, and #2 is writing a novel, then #3 would have to be the time that scrawny shy kid pierced the defenses of St. Pius X's senior boys soccer team.

I've never felt as alive, or in command of myself, as when I did when I was a kid kicking that ball around.  I'm not a believer, but if it turns out there is a heaven and I get to go, I know there will be, Field of Dreams style, a soccer field in my backyard, with 21 of my soccer buddies ready to start  whenever I am.

Alas, as all great loves seem wont to do, this one met a tragic albeit protracted demise.

It was the summer after my first year of high school, and the league program I'd played in for eight or so seasons didn't have tiers for boys my age or older.  Instead of being guaranteed a spot on a team, 50-odd kids got to compete for 36 spots, 18 in Division 1 and another 18 in Division 2.  The tryouts were held jointly, and at the end of an 8 week period playing my heart out, I made two unfortunate discoveries.  The first was that the whole thing had been a sham.  Before tryouts even started, the coach had decided what the teams would be, even though more than half the guys that made the team hadn't touched a ball once in the tryouts.  The second, a realization which grew gradually over the summer, was that Division 2 was by and large considered to be a complete and utter joke.

It would take another twenty years of limping along on broken legs for the relationship to finally come to an end.  I tried to play another season with a bunch of kids whose parents didn't know what else to do with them before I couldn't handle it.  Every few years the burning need to try again would spring up (not coincidentally around World Cup time), but wading through the morass of disorganized adolescent and senior level amateur clubs always took its toll.

The effect playing the sport has had on me is so deep, that one of the few recurring dreams I've had, and one of the few dreams the meaning of which I can say I clearly understand, involves soccer.  For twenty years my subconscious used a shorthand in my dreams for when I was feeling stuck, powerless, and generally unable to affect change in my waking life: a game is about to start, I am supposed to play, but I cannot because my gear is missing.

I finally gave up trying to play two years ago.  It took three years to find a club to play with in Toronto (I'd often joke joining a soccer team in Toronto was harder than joining a secret cult), and though I got to play with some great guys over the two years I was involved with the team, it was always a breath away from collapsing.  In fact, for the last few sessions the team operated I was one of the organizers trying to keep it afloat, but we just couldn't get momentum going and kept losing quality players.  I love the sport, but running ragged for 90 minutes every week because only 7 other guys bothered to show wasn't in the cards for guy marching steadily in the opposite direction of youthful fitness.  

I called it quits the final night of the season.  Needing only a win to advance to the playoffs and a chance to win some free beer and a cheap trophy, my team fielded the minimum number of players required for the referee to allow a game to be played.  Unsurprisingly, we got hammered.  I got home, and my bag has been in the same corner since.

The soccer dreams stopped not long after my 35th birthday.

I had a dream not too long ago that I had made the first round of cuts as a goaltender trying out for a pro hockey team.  I think it's pretty easy to see what that one means, too.