Coach's Son

I struggled with addiction as a kid… that’s right… TV. I couldn’t get enough of it. Still haven’t really kicked the habit. But because of this, I saw all the TV shows. I saw all the families. I saw all the TV dads. I saw all the talks… dad to son… dad to daughter… dad to Arnold and Willis Drummond… who, of course, became Mr. Drummond’s legal sons once they took on his last name.

TV makes many people think that these life lessons get spelled out, word for word. Papa sits you down on your neatly made bed (neatly made? never!) and he explains to you why he takes certain actions in life. He explains to you the importance of certain subjects and he does so eloquently, both due to his expert training in the field of acting and because of the crack team of writers that work until the wee hours of the night crafting his brilliant monologue. Dads give their kids lessons all the time… but it may not always be so obvious. It may not be obvious in the moment… or even for months… or even for years.

I don’t know how long it took me to see things clearly. I think each new year, I peel back another layer of the onion, and I am able to understand my dad better and better. I understand why he did the things he did. And whether they were with complete, 100% intention… or it was just that paternal instinct of his.

I played a couple sports as a kid. Soccer and basketball. My dad loved soccer and he ended up being the coach of my team for most of my playing career. Now, if you ever played in Rec leagues growing up, you might’ve been familiar with a certain term. Coach’s Son. It’s funny, because it meant one of two completely opposite things. 90% of the time, it meant that kid had a free ride. He was going to start every game, no matter how good or bad he was. He never got yelled at. He was always cheered on to excruciating lengths. Plays were drawn up for him. He got to play the position he wanted. He got the exact number he wanted on his jersey.

The other 10% is where I lived. Total opposite. Yelled at more (it's sports, you're supposed to get yelled at, at least some.) Didn’t necessarily get the position I wanted. Had to work harder. In all honesty, right from the very beginning, I was painfully aware how much I did not want to be one of those Coach’s Sons that got a free ride. Oh, the things people would say about them. They got whatever they wanted and everyone could see. Oftentimes, these kids were not the best player on the team but they were treated as such. That doesn’t really do much to keep your perception of reality… shall we call it… unwarped?

But I would often think, “Okay, can I just be treated the same as everyone else?” I remember, in practice we’d be doing a drill. A little dribbling past the orange cones, then taking a shot on goal. My dad would tell everyone that they obviously want to make the goal, if you miss it, it’s okay, but miss it low. We want to avoid booting the ball and having it soar over the net. Just kicking it hard isn’t a great strategy. So, if you kicked it over the net, you had to do a lap. Fair enough.

Teammates would go through the drill. Making it. Missing it. Someone sent it over the net… run a lap. It continued on like this. I went up… first time… kicked it over the net. (Of course, right? Because my brain got the message but it hadn’t passed it on down to my foot yet.) My dad told me to run two laps. I began to question it with one of those stupid faces you make as a teenager when you dislike something or something didn’t go your way… my dad cut it down and repeated… “Two laps.”

Okay, I guess we’re doing two laps now.

Next person sent it over the net… “One lap.”

What in the ever-living heck is going on? (Because I was afraid to even think a curse word in fear I’d have to start running four laps.)

So, it was just me. Fine. Taught me not to kick it over the net. Next time I went up, I made sure to keep it low. Missed… but to the left.

“Run two laps.”

“What? I thought we were only running laps if it went high. And why two?!”

“Do you think the goal is to miss the net? No, it’s to make it. Two laps.”

Admittedly, I don’t have the transcript on me at the moment, so I can’t be certain about the dialogue, but that was the general idea. That was just one example. But this happened all the time. I got worked harder in practice. I usually didn’t get to play the position I wanted. I wanted to be a forward (or striker, I don’t know, people have different terms, just know I am talking about the ones who score the most goals) or at the very least midfield (the ones who scored the second most amount of goals) but no, I was always defense… or… eventually I was basically full-time goalie.

No one else really wanted to play it. No one else was that great. And my dad would always tell me I was the best at it of everyone on the team and it was what was needed of me. It was a nice compliment I guess. But if you’re a kid who wants in on the action of scoring goals… at least some of the time… it’s not really what you want to hear.

“I want to be an actor in the play.”

“But you are the best at painting the sets! We need your brilliance painting the scenery or else the setting won’t look as good for the play.”

“So, that’s a no?”

But I say all of this because it taught me many things. Again, dad never sat me down at the dinner table at the 19-minute mark of the sitcom (26-minute mark if we’re including commercials) and as the emotional music began to swell… explained to me that he did all this to teach me valuable lessons in life. To teach me to work hard and all that jazz.

Because not only is life not fair and you have to work hard… but also… someone isn’t always going to explain the morals to you at every step of the way! You have to figure that stuff out for yourself! Because why?! Because… refer back to the beginning of the paragraph… life isn’t fair!

So, all of this taught me a lot. The Coach’s Son in soccer, by the way, was also The Professor’s Son who came home with report cards that didn’t look like a full-on “Vowel Fest.” That’s right, I received many Consonants on my report cards. You definitely prefer to have very few of those as The Professor’s Son if you can manage it. How do you think that reaction goes when my grades were less than stellar? Honestly, not horrible. He only made me run about 10 laps around the house for each bad grade.

I’m kidding.

But, at the time, I was a kid. I would get annoyed with my dad. “Why is he always on my case?” “One C is not the end of the world!” “Can I not play something other than goalie?!”

But then it made me work hard. It made me realize if I wanted to be good at something, if I wanted to succeed, I had to work hard. Didn’t I want to bring home a report card that was great to show my parents? Of course! Didn’t I want to do it for myself too? Of course! Then work hard. The only grades they're handing out without you doing any work are the F’s… and you don’t want those.

Didn’t I take pride in being great at goalie? Yeah, I did! So keep working at it. Maybe someday you will get what you really want in the sport! And how about basketball? Did it transfer over to that? Yeah! Did I work hard when I played basketball? Yeah, because I wanted to be good! Did I always get what I wanted in life? No… and why should I have? If I got everything that I wanted as a kid, that would’ve been setting me up for disappointment as an adult. I learned, “You get what you work for. And even then, no guarantees. The only guarantee is that if you don’t work hard, you get nothing.”

And I got a taste of my hard work paying off in a playoff soccer game one year. It was an intense game. The spectators were loving it. The players were putting on a show. Those 14-year-olds were intent on leaving it all on the field.

It was a tie game most of the way through. I believe it was 1-1. So, I let one goal by. I was really upset about that and was not going to let another one by. Regulation ended in a tie. We did overtime. Ended in a tie. So, we had to go to shootouts.

Now, I lived up to my promise, not to let another one by me. But shootouts are a whole different animal. You got a kid lining up… what feels like way too close… everything is at a standstill and you can’t move until they blast the ball with their shiny cleat. It’s harder to keep that promise in that scenario.

Or is it? Why should it be? My dad was always pushing me to be great, just like I wanted. Was this not the perfect time to prove it? I doubled down. I wouldn’t let another one by.

Each team had to pick 5 players to shoot for each team and had to put them in a specific order. My dad chose 5 of us… and he actually chose me as one… which I was quite surprised by. I didn’t think he’d select me as one of the shooters as I was already going to have to be goalie. He chose me to kick 4th.

The first kid on our team kicked, he scored!

The first kid on their team kicked, I blocked it.

The second kid on our team kicked, he scored!

The second kid on their team kicked, I blocked it.

The third kid on our team kicked… his shot was blocked.

The third kid on their team kicked, I blocked it.

Now, for those of you not too familiar with the rules to a shootout, each team gets 5 potential shots. But at some points in the shootouts, it may become mathematically impossible for one team to win. This was approaching one of those times… for the other team. We had 2. They had 0. We each had 2 kids left to shoot. Even if we didn’t score on either of our last 2 shots and they scored on their last 2 shots, the best they could do is tie, and force a new set of shootouts. But I was 4th, all I had to do was score, and we would win. They wouldn’t be able to come back.

Why did my dad randomly choose me as 4th? It’s like he knew or something.

I remember lining up and thinking… “You do not DARE kick this thing high.” For one, if I did, it’s embarrassing. But also, I might have to run laps. I didn’t want to run laps, it had been a long game and I was a bit tired. Also, even if I missed wide right or left, I might have to run laps. Best bet, put right in between the posts and hope the goalie doesn’t stop it.

It kind of felt like practice and I just didn’t want to go run around the damn field. But I kicked it straight into the net and we won the game! That was an incredible feeling!

As an aside, I think of Michael Jordan as the greatest basketball player of all time. Many people say it is LeBron James. When LeBron won the championship for Cleveland, he said later on, something to the effect of, “When I won that one for Cleveland, in my mind, that made me the greatest of all time.” I still feel like it's Jordan. But I totally get where LeBron was coming from. When I won that game, that playoff game for an under-15-rec-league in Merrimack, New Hampshire on a Saturday afternoon with roughly 54 people in attendance… I felt like the greatest sports player of all time.

Can’t take that one away from me.

It’s a silly little story, I know. But I think of it often. And it wasn’t extremely obvious to me in those years… but each passing year… I realize that my dad worked me hard so that I could be great like I wanted to be. And not just great at soccer… not just basketball and other sports… but great in life. Great with school… not just for the good grades… to actually learn. To give myself the ability to do what I want and become what I want.

There were plenty of times during the soccer years, after the soccer years, my dad also showed me how to have fun. He has a very light-hearted side to him too. I cannot listen to James Taylor and not think of him… I cannot listen to Jimi Hendrix and not think of him… specifically us driving to and from Boston and him drumming out the beat on the steering wheel… on his legs… on my legs. Usually my leg in the passenger seat served as either a cymbal or just the drums during the bridge or occasional spots in a chorus.

Again, he didn’t sit me down as I was already sitting in the car as we drove to Boston with many things in mind, mainly the Black and White Cookies we would get from the North End, and explain to me the importance of having fun… the importance of doing drum solos on your, and others’ legs. He didn’t tell me I needed to have a balance in life. He didn’t tell me specifically that I should work hard to achieve what I want but also make time to relax and have fun and enjoy the journey of life.

But he showed me.

It sunk in. I probably never realized it in those moments.

But each passing year I realize it more and more. I realize that him working me hard during soccer practice really sunk in to my core… committed osmosis to my bones. (Science community, did I use that word right? I use it all the time… and probably wrong. No matter, only tell me if I am right, not if I am incorrect.) With my freshly-osmosissed-bones, my body harnessed that and didn’t let go. I apply that style of thinking to everything.

I no longer am competing in Under 15 soccer leagues. (I try, they won’t let me, I guess due to the beard, and the 36 years of age.) But one of my main goals in life is to write. And once I set my mind on something like this, I work hard. I write all the time. I commit much time to my craft. There are no guarantees… but I want it. So, I better work hard for it. I am the Coach’s Son. No one will hand anything to me. I don’t get number 7 for a jersey just because I want it. (Everyone wants that number.) I’m not guaranteed to start a game or to play the position I want. I have to earn it.

I know what that feeling is of accomplishing something. It felt so sweet because it didn’t come easy. Because it wasn’t scripted for me. It wasn’t inevitable. It absolutely could’ve gone another way. But I worked hard and I accomplished it. Along with my teammates, of course. And my coach.

My dad showed me that things don’t just get handed to you in life. You have to work for what you want. You can’t just take the easy road. And you still can’t expect great things to happen all the time. Such is life. But if you work hard you put yourself in the perfect position to succeed… to accomplish what you want. And along the way… have fun. There are great things in life besides accomplishing goals. There’s just… having fun. There are Black and White Cookies and there are days walking around Boston exploring… taking in the scenery. But there’s also drumming to Jimi Hendrix on your legs until, much like the song, your thighs are red as “Fire.”

Because you should have goals and destinations. Those are fantastic to have. But you should also enjoy the journey there.