Tonight was A-TEAM’s last game outdoors until next spring. It seems odd that we should bring the season to a close already, but on the other hand, the timing feels right. Tonight’s game felt like it was played in a perpetual twilight, as if we were playing on borrowed time.
The outdoor season is always a decent metaphor for summer; it starts about 6 weeks before you’re really ready to bust out the bathing suits and hit the beach and by the time it’s done you have to stop denying that summer is over and put those bathing suits away, usually while sipping some hot chocolate and putting a hoodie on because you can’t bring yourself to turn on the heat.
I still have not scored. For those of you keeping count, that’s 4 seasons of soccer. It’s official; I have not scored probably ever. I say this because when I played soccer in a rec league as a kid I was stuck on defense because a) I wasn’t good enough to play forward, and b) I’m convinced at this point that my coach failed to see the tactical value in telling someone to park it on the other side of the field and draw a few players away. On the other hand, soccer at that age is cluster soccer. I sat and picked daisies and imagined I was Batman on a Bat-cycle or something. Now I just run around indoors with the theme to Dr. Who stuck in my head. No less a geek, but very much more tactically aware on the field.
Despite everything that’s happened this year, soccer has been the thing that I’ve been increasingly passionate about. A year ago I was looking at a team that was 0-40 and I was preparing to walk away from it. When you drop $500 for an outdoor season and then try and collect from a team full of players who knows we don’t win games, it gets frustrating.
Things have changed, though. We don’t break .500, we’re closer to .250, but we enjoy every game. Yes, we get streaky. Last week we played an indoor game against the Rangers, one of the best teams in the league, and held them to a 1-point lead. We almost tied. Last session we beat a team twice in a row, pretty decisively, and then lost both games to them. Tonight we lost to a team that we’ve beaten pretty consistently since we started winning.
In the end, it’s irrelevant. We field a decent game most weeks. We remain a threat to most teams, and on a personal level, there are two items left on my bucket list that have yet to be fulfilled: I have yet to score a goal, and this team has yet to beat its arch rival. When those both happen (preferably at once) I may re-evaluate, but the truth is that soccer is something I’m genuinely interested in playing. I really don’t care about professional baseball or basketball or pro football (I give half a rip about a few college football teams), but on the morning after a game of rec league soccer, I would love to tell you how that game went, because I was a part of that. It’s an awesome feeling, and I’m excited to carry that momentum into the indoor season.
A-TEAM is signed up for another indoor season. I’m not sure who’s playing. I know what our roster is, and the roster looks good. I look forward to the prospect of crushing our arch-rivals in the one game I ask my parents to come to, regardless of which ringers they bring or how few players from that team are still on the team.
All I know is that I cannot wait for the indoor season to start. I look forward to tearing it up.
Leave a Reply