On communication, professional and otherwise.
Off the week of March 24 for what my company grandly calls our “Spring Recess.” If you haven’t seen it, this epic story and video tale of an ill-advised 2019 motorcycle journey across the equator and back ought to hold you.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I signed a deal with the publisher Disruption Books for my next book, titled Soccer Dad.
Why has it taken my normally preening self so long to say so?
I think I’m excited about this one, to the point of being nervous. (One Christmas Eve as a kid, I got hives.)
Why so excited? Because I actually think this book might comfort and enlighten and prepare some people, for some strange and disorienting shit—by simply telling a true story from an honest point of view (mine).
To be published in 2026 and likely available for pre-order in late 2025, Soccer Dad is the story of a well-meaning soccer parent trying to guide a child through the dark and silent wilderness of serious youth soccer. It’s the story of any sports parent, trying to maintain sanity in the largely mad world of travel sports. Really, it’s the story of the parent of any child who develops an early passion and talent for one thing, while the whole world is still that child’s oyster. And ultimately, it’s the story of any parent or influential adult, whipsawed daily between trying to steer a child down any strange and narrow path, and wanting to let that child wander out toward a broader horizon, to be free.
My last book, An Effort to Understand (also Disruption Books, 2021), was my philosophy of communication; a grandiose enterprise. This book is not my philosophy of parenting. Ever told a friend or family member how to raise their kids? I hope you wore a helmet and eye protection.
But I have heard from early readers that there’s universal appeal in my own story and observations, as one soccer-ignorant, travel sports-innocent, middling youth-athlete who (in general cooperation and occasional conflict with his wife) gum-flapped, gut-felt and guessed his way through his daughter’s childhood soccer career that yielded—just barely, thanks in part to his own self-involved laziness—a Division I college scholarship. And who then, to his continuing surprise, faced the harder and more hapless work, of trying to help that daughter have a happy and mentally healthy college career within the widely known weirdness that is major collegiate sports.
And all with precious little real camaraderie or candor from other parents, who applied their own severely limited knowledge and instincts to worrying and working angles for their own kids. Nor was there much helpful insight or wisdom from travel league administrators or coaches, who had financial interests and professional ambitions that most of us, perhaps studiously, did not well understand until very late in the game.
I hope to provide a measure of all of those things to other sports parents, with Soccer Dad.
Send me that manuscript! Is an urgent command I’ve heard and occasionally heeded from parents I know who are trembling on the edge of the maw or tumbling helplessly into the gullet of the youth sports monster that they sense I and my daughter are on the verge of surviving, intact. Those who have read it express a strong impulse to share it with others. (I suspect there are others more deeply invested in a flawed and borderline fraudulent youth sports system who might have different kinds of strong reactions to this book. I’m interested in having those conversations too—I think?)
Meanwhile, I am enjoying, this last spring before my soccer daughter’s senior year, the happy state of having written. And I’ll enjoy collaborating with Disruption’s fine and loving editors and artists to make this book just as good as it can be. And soon enough, I’ll be in the warm studios of Tyson Ellert Productions to record the audiobook—for which my daughter will read her own speaking parts. She also says she’s up for joining me on parts of the media/book tour after she graduates next spring. How fun will that be?!
So for now? I’m not preening, I’m beaming.
P.S. Soon, I will need to reach the multitudes of soccer dads and other sports parents. Elaborate marketing and social media plans will develop, but I begin today by asking Writing Boots readers to forward this post to parents you know who you think might want to read Soccer Dad. They may simply email me at writingboots@gmail.com to request a notice when the book is available for pre-order. And if you’d like to be on that list, send me an email yourself. Thanks.
One of the Sunday baseball guys proposed a little batting practice last weekend. It didn’t happen, but just the idea buoyed me. I told the guy:
The first year I played baseball in Chicago was the COVID summer of 2020. I remember being in center—I played center a lot that first year—and realizing I hadn’t thought about COVID for 90 minutes straight.
We need baseball this year like we needed it that year.
Like switching the channel from “Kars 4 Kids.” Like a car alarm stopping before starting back up again. Like the one snow day in the middle of the junior-high year you were getting picked on every single day at recess.
If not this weekend, then maybe next.
