Writing Boots

I wrote my book Soccer Dad to give other parents a helpful tour of the winding and rocky youth sports road our family took from kiddie soccer all the way through our daughter’s Division I soccer career. The story of our trip, I hoped, would serve as a guide to your trip.

Well: Yes, but.

Yes:

Just a few weeks after the book’s launch, I’m getting emotional Instagram messages from strangers on their kids’ soccer sidelines, telling me, “I got it this afternoon and have devoured it. Shed tears—laughter and frustration.” 

And, “I read it in a week while sitting in my car at my kids’ practices, sandwiched between back-to-back weekends traveling from Rhode Island to New York and New Jersey for league games. I’ve recommended your book to all the soccer moms and dads.” 

Just as meaningfully, a normally reserved former college teammate of my daughter’s texted, “Finally got to crack open the book today and couldn’t put it down. Told [my daughter] it felt like the best invasion of privacy I could’ve imagined. So cool to see how her and my experiences were so similar but took place hundreds of miles away. I’m really glad you wrote it. It’s going to help so many people.”

Those are exactly the kinds of reactions I’d hoped for, from people who were learning from the book, or relating to it, or both.

But:

I’m getting reactions I didn’t expect, from readers of Soccer Dad who are unfamiliar with the youth sports world that all of us have inhabited and for all our objections and concerns, have gotten used to and come to see as normal, more or less.

People on the outside get mad and upset, reading Soccer Dad. 

One reader described her shock at learning about the “profit- and glory-focused, sometimes bizarre, world of competitive youth sports.” She continued, “I had little idea about that world, and am glad to have had no part in it.”

She described our story as “a roller coaster of dreams pursued; joy attained, lost, regained; lifelong friendships born; self-esteem built, self-esteem crushed (by brutal coaches); and tons of money spent. I literally had to take a breather after reading it.”

Wow, right? To me, the value of our family’s story isn’t that it’s truly remarkable, or that our daughter’s coaches were particularly brutal or that we spent any more money or had more ups and downs than anyone else we traveled with. It’s that, in most ways, ours was typical of a serious trip through youth sports. 

“I hated so much of what she went through,” wrote another reader from outside the youth sports experience, about my daughter. “It was poignant yet traumatizing.”

People on the outside see youth soccer as dangerous and unhealthy for kids—the way I once saw youth ballet.

My younger sister was in ballet when we were young—wound up dancing professionally. That world was so all-consuming, so expensive, so physically and emotionally brutal and so dominated by crazy adults that I steered my young daughter away from it—and anything I considered related to it, like gymnastics—with passion and force.

Instead, I blithely introduced her into what my wife and I thought were far less obsessive and more sensible activities, like tee ball and kiddie soccer. And soon, as a non-sports-oriented reader interpreted it in a review on Amazon, we were “drawn reluctantly and incrementally into the cutthroat world of youth sports—a closed, ask-no-questions society in which the seemingly well-intentioned attention and concern of coaches and experts in your child’s well-being inevitably take a backseat to their own marginal financial interests and the ego gratification that comes with winning at all costs.”

Damn, that sounds bad! And yet, I do see what that reader is saying. I can see this world from his point of view, and I can’t tell him he’s wrong.

Another reader actually compared soccer to her own youth ballet career: “I am neither a parent, nor a big sports person, but this book took me into a world of parenting and sports that reminded me much of my days as a serious ballet dancer—the hours of practice, the pressure of leveling up, the parents who devoted all their free time to driving, and coaching, and paying for the best training available.”

However sick they think the youth sports society is, these outsiders think more communication is the cure.

“No two soccer dads, or moms, or players, or coaches can read this book and not be forced into a more honest conversation about what’s going on,” one reader wrote, in another Amazon review. He called for all involved to “do a better job limiting the risks and reaping the rewards of the opportunities offered when kids play ball.”

I’ve already seen evidence that reader is right about the book forcing conversation. My daughter’s college coach had a strong reaction to his portrayal in my book—one that inspired him to propose that he and I and my daughter go on a podcast together and talk it all through in hopes such a dialogue could help coaches and parents and the players they wish to better support. And so we will.

All of which brings me back to my original purpose in writing Soccer Dad: I wanted to give parents—and coaches and kids—a single common story to refer to, not just for themselves, but for one another. A shared frame of reference for navigating this exciting but troubled terrain less as bewildered and lonely individuals, but as more of a team, with a common goal: our children’s happiness, after all.

The Chicago marketing agency Leff Communications put out a video last week in which production editor Morgan Strunsky urged people not to let “flagxiety”—the fear of having your writing flagged as AI-generated—stop them from using em dashes in their writing.

Hear—hear!

But anyone who’s worried their writing will be flagged as AI-written should have been worried for years that their writing was being dismissed quietly for its lack of style and unique point of view and original ideas.

Which is a lot of people, in the period since it became a professional requirement for every white-collar worker bee to purport to offer consistent “thought leadership” on LinkedIn.

When I came into the communication business three decades ago, there were trade publications whose editors and columnists did the thinking for the profession. We published letters to the editor from practitioners who objected or amplified those ideas.

When the Internet came in, another relative handful of new voices came in, some of them speaking loudly and well on online forums and with their own blogs. But those folks were always outliers, and there was absolutely zero pressure for every working communicator to be a talking head, too—and in some cases, there was pressure against it.

Not that those were the good old days.

But great writers and iconic thinkers are rare, in any profession, in any society. And if my LinkedIn contacts are now using AI to compose their important-sounding drivel, they don’t have to worry about being “flagged” by me, because I probably stopped eating their prose porridge years ago—after the first or second serving.

I don’t go in for that “selfless mothers” trope any more than I go for the “teachers are heroes” routine. Pay the teachers and don’t make the mothers hide their light under a bushel, I say.

Yet, I just spent two years writing and one year promoting a book about how Scout’s teacher mom I raised her. And naturally, I called it Soccer Dad.

Yes, I dedicated the book to her, writing an opening note

about my wife, Cristie Bosch, who appears in this book far less frequently than she would if it were titled Soccer Parents. It’s called Soccer Dad because I write best when I speak for myself, and my own experience. My wife, of course, was my full partner in this soccer parenting effort, from getting Scout signed up to her first tyke’s soccer program to counseling Scout throughout her college soccer experience. Ask the bartender at the Ohio University Inn the evening after we dropped Scout off at college: Cristie and I shared the joys and the sorrows equally. We also sometimes differed in our emotional reactions to games and their consequences. But most of that tension was creative, and all of it helped the two of us see this strangely shaped project from another point of view. And another point of view—sometimes any other point of view—is often exactly what a soccer parent needs to maintain perspective in an often-warped world.

Ultimately, how we performed as soccer parents is probably just a measure of how we performed as parents. However well or poorly we did at both, Scout’s mom and I did this together, and I dedicate this book to her.

… and of course I was very happy she got some love by Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Kogan (and Trib photographer John Kim) in a piece on the book launch last month.

But still, it must be said: Cristie Bosch is a hero teacher, and also is a mother who gives more than she gets—as all mother birds do—and as Scout well knows.

Scout, who has flown off with her old teammates on a post-graduation tour of Europe, leaving Dadbird to hold down the Mother’s Day action around here. As usual, I’m scrounging for a last-minute gift.

I was touched by this moment a couple years ago, and I’m touched by it again, as we go into this weekend.

We’ll watch this together Sunday, and there won’t be a dry eye in our house.