Rule in sports for kids creates simple haven

Soccer brings out the best in the students and the worst in the parents. On game day, the boys whoop like warrior bumblebees.

The athletic director at Saint John’s School has very high standards for parent coaches: They must have a pulse. He has voluntold me into basketball, baseball, cross-country and our current sport: futbol. I did ask him once, “When did we run out of straight fathers?”

I have no qualifications. Back at St. Anthony of Padua in South Ozone Park, I avoided all organized sports until Brother X signed me up for the bowling league, in which I never once scored higher than 57, and at the award banquet, they handed me the “League’s Worst Bowler” trophy.

All I knew about soccer four years ago was that we weren’t supposed to touch the ball with our hands, which is why every other country calls the game “football.” But in the United States, we had already used that name for a sport where you pass a piece of leather with your hands. So we relied on the Brits, who made a distinction between “Rugby Football” and “Association Football” and we call it Soccer for short.

My entire coaching style could be summed up in the phrase “Kick the ball,” which the players already know how to do, but makes me feel like I have mentored these seventhgraders. I’ve been coaching these boys since they were 9, and as they’ve grown higher, I’ve grown wider. When they were third-graders, I had mystical authority status with them. If I told them to run as far as the Diamond Heights Safeway, they ran. Older but wiser, they don’t volunteer for “suicides” anymore, and their stretching exercises consist of rolling their eyes at me. But they’ve got spirit.

Soccer brings out the best in the students and the worst in the parents. On game day, the boys whoop like warrior bumblebees, and almost every coach I’ve met, from Silver Terrace to Golden Gate park, is pretty chill. The ones who bring flasks are a little more chill, but I digress.

But there is always one parent who screams, “Pyramid Formation!” or “Metodo!” at 11 boys who have barely mastered the art of keeping their shin guards up. And that parent invariably comes to lecture me about what I did not tell the boys to do, and that happens whether we win or lose. But never once does this parent volunteer to coach. We’ve been to the CYO finals twice, based not on tactics but enthusiasm, and we like it that way.

For that reason, I hate soccer games, but I love soccer practice. Twice a week, we go into the little forest in the middle of the city and kick a ball around. My one rule for practice is that you can’t say anything mean to a teammate.

Glen Canyon Park is 60 acres of woods, and the Islais Creek is the largest rivulet in Fran Sancisco, the last natural habitat of the Mission blue butterfly. Around the soccer fields are eucalyptus, and red-tailed hawks circle above the players, occasionally swooping down to make their own goals.

Fun fact for the day: Glen Canyon Park is the birthplace of the Nobel Peace Prize. When Adolf Sutro bought the land in the 1850s, he called it the Gum Tree Ranch. And in case you’re wondering, that is why so much of the Blue Bungalow in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior has gumwood in it. But then in 1867, this Swedish guy named Alfred Nobel took out a patent for something he called “dynamite.” He sold the exclusive American rights to Julius Bandman of San Francisco, who set up the Giant Powder Co. right there. As you may imagine, the factory exploded. In fact, the factory built after it (in what is now called the Sunset) also exploded. In fact, the factory built after the factory built after it, in Berkeley, also exploded. It was about this time that Nobel, who had made a lot of money on destruction, began to think of peace, and so he established in his will five prizes, including the Nobel Peace Prize.

And so, in this enclave of coyote brush scrub and field mustard, the boys chase each other around for an hour, the creek running lazily by. At 12 and 13, they don’t care so much about victory and how that translates into a college scholarship. They know only this: “Coach Kevin says don’t say anything mean.”

I blow the whistle, and we gather in a circle, in muddy cleats and grass-stained shorts, and we put our hands together, and Aidan yells: “One! Two! Three!” and we all yell “Eagles!” And throw our hands in the air. We might never win a CYO trophy. We might never get prizes from Sweden, but it doesn’t get any more peaceful than that.

It’s not only the last refuge of the Mission blue butterfly; it’s the last refuge of innocence.