Twenty-Two Boys, a Borrowed Trophy, and Nothing to Feed Them

The team nobody else would take

I did not set out to coach soccer. I set out, three years ago, to get my own son to stop moping around the house on Saturdays, and the under-11 team at our local club in Benoni needed a coach or they were going to fold. Nobody else put up their hand. So I put up mine, a man who had played a bit of social football twenty years and twenty kilograms ago, and suddenly I was responsible for twenty-two boys who ran in all directions like startled chickens and listened to roughly none of what I said.

We were, that first season, genuinely terrible. I want to be clear about that, because it matters to the rest of the story. We lost almost every game, often badly. There was a match we lost by double figures where I could see the other coach feeling sorry for us, which is a special kind of humiliation. But something strange happened over those months. I stopped caring about the scoreline and started caring about the boys, and I think they could feel that, and slowly they started turning up not to win but because it was theirs. Our thing. Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, ours.

The afternoon I did not plan for

By the end of that first dreadful season I had, without quite deciding to, become fond of these hopeless little chickens. We had won exactly two games, both of which I will remember on my deathbed. And it dawned on me, late, far too late, that I was expected to do something I had given absolutely no thought to. An end-of-season function. A prize-giving. A last afternoon where the parents come and the boys get a little certificate and somebody, apparently, is meant to feed everyone.

I had planned training drills for months. I had not planned this at all. I remember the mother who ran the club admin cornering me after a match and saying, cheerfully, so what are you doing for the kids' do, and me nodding wisely while my stomach dropped, because I was doing absolutely nothing, I had not thought about it once, and it was two weeks away.

The men who plan everything except the food

Here is a thing I have learned about myself and, I suspect, about a lot of men who end up coaching kids. We will happily plan the serious stuff, the drills, the positions, the little speech. It is the ordinary human hospitality, the feeding of people, that we somehow assume will sort itself out. It does not sort itself out. Twenty-two hungry boys and their parents and younger siblings do not materialise sandwiches out of the warm afternoon air.

My first instinct was to do it all myself, because I am stubborn and I did not want to admit I had dropped the ball. I bought bread and cheese and polony one evening with grand plans of making it all at home, and I stood in my kitchen at ten at night having produced about eight sorry sandwiches and a mess, with an entire soccer team's worth still to go, and I understood, finally, that this was not a one-man kitchen job. My wife, watching me spread margarine with the energy of a defeated man, suggested very gently that I was perhaps not the right person to feed forty humans by hand.

Learning that this is a solved problem

What I had not grasped, in my panic, is that feeding a crowd is a completely solved problem that other people deal with for a living, and that I did not have to reinvent it at ten at night with a butter knife. My wife, who is far more practical than I am, pointed out that I could simply order a proper platter or two and be done with it, instead of personally martyring myself over cold margarine.

I felt a bit sheepish, honestly. In my head, buying the food in felt like cheating, like I was not pulling my weight as the coach. But she set me straight. The boys, she said, do not care whose hands made the sandwiches. They care that there is food, that it is there when they are hungry and excited and showing their certificates to their mothers, and that nobody is stressed. The point of the afternoon was the boys, not my pride about bread.

So I did the sensible thing for once. I worked out the numbers, allowing for the bottomless appetites of eleven-year-olds and the parents and the inevitable extra cousins who always appear, and I sorted out the takeaways for the whole function in about the time it had taken me to ruin eight sandwiches the night before. It was almost insulting how easy it turned out to be, compared to the mountain I had made of it in my head.

The last afternoon

The function was on a bright Saturday at the club. The parents brought camp chairs. I gave my little speech, which I had actually rehearsed in the car, and I managed to say something true about each boy, which took longer than planned because there were twenty-two of them and I welled up around number fourteen, a small boy who had started the season unable to kick straight and who had scored our second ever goal, the one I will remember on my deathbed.

And the food, when it came out, was simply there, abundant and sorted, a proper spread of platters that the boys fell upon like the locusts they are. No stress. No ten-at-night martyrdom. I got to actually be present at the thing I had built, instead of hiding behind a kitchen counter spreading margarine and resenting it. I stood with a paper plate and watched twenty-two boys who could barely win a game inhale sandwiches and compare certificates, and their parents chatting easily on their camp chairs, and I thought, this is the whole thing, this is what the season was actually for.

One of the dads, a quiet man whose son was the startled-chicken-in-chief, came over and shook my hand and said his boy had not shut up about soccer all season, that the kid who used to hide in his room now had somewhere to belong. He did not mention the food, of course. Nobody ever mentions the food when it is right. They only notice it when it is wrong, or absent, or eight sorry sandwiches short.

What the butter knife taught me

We are three seasons in now, and I am a better coach, which is a low bar I have cleared comfortably. But the real thing I learned that first year had nothing to do with formations. It was that caring about people means caring about the whole of the day, including the unglamorous human business of feeding them, and that there is no shame at all in letting someone who is good at a thing do that thing, so that you can be fully present for the part only you can do.

Every season now, when the last Saturday comes around, I sort the food out early and without drama, order the platters well ahead, and spend the actual afternoon where I am supposed to be, among the boys, welling up around certificate number fourteen like clockwork. My wife still teases me about the night of the eight sandwiches. I let her. She earned it. She is the one who taught a stubborn man that love, sometimes, looks like simply ordering enough food so that you can keep your hands free for the people you love.