Futsal in Oklahoma City

I just got back from Oklahoma City for my 9-year-old son’s futsal tournament. Futsal is like soccer but indoors on a hard surface, on a smaller field and faster paced overall.

I don’t know the rules for soccer let alone futsal. But I’m always happy to go places with my son and cheer him on, whether or not I know what’s actually going on on the field. Or with the off-field, sideline politics amongst the parents.

As with most things, I get the gist if not the intricacies of both the on-field play and the off field positional jockeying.

Generally, my husband is in charge of the kids’ activities. He books their sports lessons and trainings, he drives them to and fro, pays the team dues, manages the increasingly complicated scheduling of activities, fills in all the school forms, kibitzes with the other parents, etc.

I sometimes feel guilty about the fact that he does all of this and I do nothing except show up to cheer. Moms are sort of pre-conditioned to feel guilty about not doing enough.

But then I stop myself and I don’t feel guilty. And what a relief that is.

I make the money and do most of the cooking. We divide the cleaning. He does the dishes. I do the maintenance sweeping and dusting and mopping and straightening. He does the laundry, I fold it and put it away. He does the manly garbage duty. And then there’s all the typically mom-driven kid stuff that he runs with and makes his own.

It’s a good deal, in my opinion, as I hate doing dishes and I hate unloading the dishwasher even more. And I am very uncomfortable with friendly small-talk with the parents of my children's friends. I don’t know why. It’s just not in my wheelhouse. I have my own friends. I do not want to make friends with parents just because our children play sports together. Perhaps that’s a tad curmudgeonly. Oh well.

Overall, my husband and I have landed on a pretty equitable division of labor which we sort of fell into naturally and fits our unique skill sets.

At any rate, the not handling sports sign ups has sort of turned into not really immersing myself in the youth sports culture, which I am quite happy with. Having spent my youth and adolescence deeply immersed in dysfunctional youth sports culture, I have a bit of an allergic reaction to it, specifically to overzealous parents on the sidelines. I end up wanting to shout at them a lot:

1. Be nice!

2. It’s just a dumb sport!

3. You realize the chances of your kid actually being world-class is almost zero, right? Are you clear on that? He may seem good now but that’s one youth team, in one town, in one state, in one country . . . relax. Let him have some fun.

I don’t say any of these things. I realize that these pearls of wisdom — informed by a youth spent in elite sports — would come off as not very nice. Especially the last one. So I just sort of keep my distance and watch from my own little perch off to the side.

My hope for my son — who loves soccer — is that he learns the value of hard work, he learns how to pick himself up after a loss and keep trying, he learns to adopt a “growth mindset” (I know, very trendy right now) through which he can say: I may not be able to do this now or yet, but if I keep working on it, then I’ll get better at it and maybe master it one day. In short, I hope that sports can teach him how not to be a quitter. That will serve him in life much more than a perfect V-Pull or Rainbow Kick.

I also want him to love something enough, for it to matter enough, that he doesn’t want to get into heaps of trouble in high school — drinking and causing a ruckus — or fall into a youthful rebellious nihilism. If he has practice on Saturday morning, maybe that will be incentive enough not to get wasted on Friday night. It worked for me in high school. Or, alternatively, I want him to love something enough that he doesn’t want to just sit home and play video games for 9 hours a day.

Soccer is wholesome. He runs a lot. He supports his teammates. He gets a lot of exercise and he already has an intuitive understanding of the “mind body connection” — meaning, he’s happier overall when he’s running around in the sunshine.

My son is on multiple teams in multiple leagues. I don’t know the parents. I don’t know the leagues. I know nothing. Sounds bad, I know. But it works. I also have no illusions about how good he is, what sort of scholarship or career could come if he trains hard enough. I’m a realist. I know that is unlikely and it isn’t the point.

But I will tell you, for a lot of parents, it is absolutely the point and the way they scream from the sidelines is evidence.

I try to find a balance. You don’t want to seem so nonchalant as to be uncaring. But a parent who is too invested is too much pressure for the child. It can come across as it all just mattering too much. Like you love them because of their athletic prowess and what they achieve out on the field and not just because they’re your kid.

So anyway, me being the chaperone at this tournament over the weekend was interesting. Because, I knew no one. I was a total outsider. But I sat and I cheered and I watched and I learned about the game and the culture of youth futsal (and soccer, because many of the kids play both).

First of all, don’t mistake a traveling tournament as high level, necessarily. If a club registers, pays and fields a team — they can go. It isn’t evidence of elite potential. Though I think a lot of parents take it to mean that. And there are a small minority of kids who are clearly playing at a level well above their peers — and this is amongst peers who take the sport seriously and are training a lot already.

We’ve progressed from the youth recreational league phase to that of athleticism + disciplined training being required to make the team. Beyond this phase comes the one where athleticism plus actual talent plus extremely hard work plus a natural aptitude/eye for the game plus perseverance and the will to win must come together to set a player apart. Few emerge as strong high school players, let alone college scholarship candidates, let alone national team member contenders.

Second, there is a parent pecking order. The parents of the best kids on any given team hold some dominance or un-appointed leader status. The parent who is most involved and connected also holds some status in the internecine group dynamic, even if their kid isn’t one of the best players. Then there’s me. There is some status in standing apart and not really giving a shit. It kind of makes people curious about you.

Lastly, there are codes. The women seem to mostly dress the same way. The right Lululemon leggings or Vuori joggers. The right extra large water bottle from Hydro or Stanley or Yeti — of a size that one would only need if lost in the desert for a week rather than holed up at the Oklahoma City Convention Center for 3 youth futsal matches in a day. Manicured nails and hair that is either straightened or manufactured with “effortless” waves. Maybe that last part isn’t soccer moms, it’s just women my age and social status. But I missed the memo and I wore 501 jeans and a ragged looking ponytail and sported my signature chewed up nails. And I carried zero water, just a continuous flow of pretty bad drip coffee.

Many of the moms and dads played D1 or D2 college soccer. They shout tips at their kids from the sidelines. One mom was apparently a former gymnast and the other parents joked about her inability to throw an errant ball in from the sidelines — she throws like a gymnast! (They ain’t seen nothing.) They did seem impressed that she’d been a gymnast. I didn’t offer up my own athletic history or credentials as a long time national team member and former national champion, as it seemed beside the point. I just listened and smiled. Oooh cool, a gymnast! my face tried to say.

There are other types of parents there that don’t fit the bill of a soccer mom meme.

There are many Hispanic families speaking Spanish to their kids. There are many black families and Asian families and mixed race families and even hipster families. It’s definitely not just stereotypical, suburban white “soccer moms” in high end athleisure-wear. And the parents of the best kids inevitably have the most status even if they aren’t trying for that. They just garner respect.

The kid with the most skills and swagger on every team has a crazy hairdo — a pink mohawk or shaved on all sides with patterns carved in. A kid with less ability would seem over his skis if he were to don such an ostentatiously confident hairstyle. He wouldn’t have earned that kind of braggadocio.

Ultimately there are codes of behavior and pecking orders which I don’t want any part of. I don’t feel compelled to compete or puff up my chest or have my kid be the best or get the right water bottle for him or myself. And I don’t mean to make these people out as anything but nice. They were — and are — nice. But it’s a group. There’s a dynamic. And I recoil at groups and dynamics.

Ultimately — as Groucho Marx said — I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.

Perhaps I’m a bit of a crank though I don’t think that’s it. I’m happy overall I just like to go my own way, unconstrained by codes and social “norms” that are inevitably imposed upon individuals to be good-standing members of any particular group.

Which is, perhaps why, I’ve been able to walk away from groups of which I was a member of significant status — whether it was in gymnastics, corporate America or San Francisco. I consider “weird” the highest compliment.

But even the “weirdo” groups have social codes and norms. I was drawn to those as a young adult who felt like I didn’t fit in — the goths, and punks, and “alternative” sets. But no matter the group, at some point, you’ll have to go along with something or adopt a stance just to fit in and conform to the particular codes of that particular group.

And yes, this happens even in adult cliques and clubs and cohorts. Conformity is for everyone, not just the young.

But I reject it all.

I was just there for the futsal. And some sightseeing. And, most of all, my kid.