Yellow Buttons

I am a book nerd and always have been.

I have never been particularly athletic, or even interested in sports. Why would I want to go outside and kick or hit or throw a ball around and get all sweaty when I could stay inside and read a book instead?

My parents wanted me to be well-rounded, though. So when I was in fifth grade my mom signed me up for a soccer league. I dIdn’t really want to play, but I didn’t object too strenuously because that would have taken too much effort and wasted time I could have spent reading a book.

...

In addition to my preference for reading over sports (either watching or playing) I lacked the four C’s: Coordination, Competitiveness, Caring, and Confidence.

Coordination - This has never been one of my strong suits. Even in my youth I couldn’t stand on one leg at a time long enough to put my underwear on without falling over.

Competitiveness - I am probably the least competitive person I know - UNLESS you challenge me to a competition to see who can create the longest anecdote by dragging out details and making observations about something insignificant that happened decades ago, in which case IT’S ON.

Caring - I might have been able to develop some athletic skill over time with lots of practice. But in order for that to have happened I would have had to have cared (which I didn’t).

Confidence - Nobody wants an uncoordinated person with an obvious distaste for sports and no interest in winning on their team. So I was always picked last on teams for sports in school, which squashed whatever confidence I MIGHT have had and made me care even less about sports.

And it is that lack of confidence that is the basis for (and leads to the lesson of) today’s post.

...

The soccer league my mom signed me up for wasn’t with school but with some outside organization. We practiced on weekdays after school and played other teams on Saturday mornings.

I don’t remember how well my team did in competitions. During both practices and meets I had a tendency to wander off to do my own thing if not adequately supervised.

The only thing that kept me from quitting outright (other than my mother) was the hope of getting a yellow button to sew on my sock. If you made a goal in a game (or if you gave the assist) the coaches would give you a yellow button to sew on one of your soccer socks. I would come out from wherever I was hiding for the possibility of getting a yellow button.

When we would practice it was just our team, so we’d split into two teams and play each other. Since everybody was needed it was harder for me to sneak away.

On one particular day at practice the coaches had me guard the left side of one of the goals - not as a goalie, but as one of two guards guarding the goalie who was guarding the goal. Good luck making sense of that. I don’t know the names of the soccer positions and I don’t care to.

Knowing that my position would make it nearly impossible for me to make (or assist) a goal, one of the coaches (who was really trying to get me to take an interest in the game and put forth some effort) dangled that yellow-button-carrot in front of me and told me that if I did a good job guarding the goal that day I could have a yellow button to sew on my sock.

So I guarded the goal. When the ball was kicked to me from across the field, I stopped it and prepared to kick it back from whence it came. But I hesitated. What if I tried to kick it and missed it entirely? Or didn’t kick it far enough? Both were certainly within the realm of possibility. So I did what made sense to me at the time and kicked it to the girl guarding the other side of the goal because (I reasoned) she was bigger and better at soccer and could probably kick it way farther away than I ever could.

But the ball didn’t go straight across to the other girl guarding the other side of the goal as I’d intended. It bent right and went straight....into OUR goal.

The goalie, caught completely unaware by her OWN TEAM MEMBER kicking the ball into her goal, didn’t catch it and instead looked completely bewildered because why would anyone score against their own team??

Amidst all the shouting and booing I didn’t get the chance to explain my strategy to my team members and instead became forever known as The Girl Who Was So Stupid She Scored A Goal Against Her Own Team.

Mercifully, the season ended shortly thereafter. I never got a yellow button.

The coach tried to get me to agree to play again the following year with promises of more yellow buttons to come. But by then I’d realized I could spare myself a lot of grief if I just went out and bought a stupid yellow button myself.

...

The moral of this story is DON’T SECOND GUESS YOURSELF! You have within you what it takes to succeed - whether in a soccer game, or in business, or in anything else you may wish to pursue. DON’T hand off the reins to someone else assuming they can do a better job of it! You have exactly what it takes to do the job and do it well!

Nah, I’m kidding. The moral of the story is don’t let your mom sign you up for stuff you know you probably won’t be good at. 😜

(That emoji kind of looks like a yellow button. Totally unintentional!)