USMNT Julep

When I was in first grade, my parents signed me up for our neighborhood soccer team in the local community league. Didn't make a whole lot of sense to me at the time -- our family was and is much more baseball-oriented, and my grandfather and uncles had been throwing wiffle balls, tennis balls, and baseballs to me (and at me) since I was knee-high to a squirrel. I think the people in my folks' cocktail party circuit were getting their kids into soccer, though, so that's the way it went.


I wasn't very good. Middle of the pack speed, rudimentary ball skills, not willing to take a header. But that's the way it went, a Larchmont halfback in 1st grade, then 2nd, and on up. By 3rd or 4th grade I was markedly better, owing simply to playing season after season, and by sixth grade I was starting at forward. In my last game that year, I scored four goals in an 8-0 rout of league rival Ghent. Soccer was my sport, every autumn.


But then, well, our school offered junior-junior varsity football to grades 7 and up, so that's the way I went. I trotted off the soccer pitch at age 12 and never looked back. There was simply more allure with football, more American street cred and more potential for glory. For me, the move -- coupled with my growing to 6'4" by the time I was 16 -- led to a high school career littered with dozens, nay several touchdowns, some paltry Virginian-Pilot coverage, and a hearty sex life of backseat handjobs from one of the prettier cheerleaders. The gilded days, as they say.


Save for a pair of left-footed fluke goals in one of our Lumpless Gravy B-side soccer matches in college, my futbol playing days largely ended with my fellow 6th graders. (Oh, there was also an indoor match in which Mr. Truck and I played a man down and lost 15-1 after an own goal put us up 1-0.) But my interest in the sport was never fully extinguished, not by years of dedication to other sports, not by the nation's general apathy to it, not by decades of drinking heavily and forgetting everything I once knew.


In 1992, our comrade Cliffy and I, both in our bonus year at W&M, enrolled in Principles of Coaching, a Kinesiology class that reeked of "gut" more than a Mangino waistband. (We were scouring the curriculum for such classes by that point.) As part of the class, we coached the Comets, a 1st grade squad whose saga I won't bother relating but was filled with comedy, drama, and an uplifting final chapter worthy of an ABC Afterschool Special. Plus, we got A's, which I desperately needed. And the sport got its hooks in me once again.


Here we are, 18 years later (yikes), and my two daughters are both seasoned veterans in the community soccer league in the same town where I donned the Larchmont kelly green so many years ago. And now, with the United States poised to make some noise in the most watched tournament in the world (I need the YES network to spruce up that hyperbole), the sport has infected me like that itch I picked up in New Orleans. I'm still that same first-grade spazzy mcgee flailing about out there, but now I'm in a bar watching my countrymen excel.

So here's to this sport soccer, and here's to an American generation that has played and coached it now watching intently and hoping for national success.