My daughter Scout is preparing for her senior year of college—and her last year of playing college soccer. There is some talk of playing professionally in Europe or elsewhere, but it’s speculative, and in any case it will be such a different and distant scene that it’s well for her—and for her parents and her teammates and their parents, to contemplate what it has all meant, what it means now … and what it might mean to all of us, ever after.
So I’m on the lookout for these kinds of conversations. And they’re everywhere all of a sudden.
There was American tennis underdog Amanda Anisimova’s beautiful speech after miraculously making the Wimbledon final last weekend only to lose 6-0, 6-0 to the third-ranked player in the world, Iga Swiatek. And then stood and delivered a brave and tearful speech. Watching her tell her mother, sobbing (who stood in the audience applauding)—”My mom’s put in more work than I have, honestly”—as a sports parent, I would never even want to hear a thing like that from my kid (and it wouldn’t be true). But boy, I sure felt it in this old heart.
Then the world’s best golfer Scottie Scheffler gave a press conference this week at the Open Championship in which he asked about winning golf tournaments, “What is the point?” He said, “I love the challenge, I love to be able to play this game for a living, it’s one of the greatest joys of my life, but at the end of the day, does it fill the deepest wants and desires of my heart? Absolutely not.”
If that was refreshing, this was deeply moving—a long and grieving interview of U.S. soccer legend Tobin Heath by fellow soccer star Christen Press, about Heath’s retirement.
“I don’t know if you would ever know me in my deepest way without football,” Heath tells her longtime partner Press, who recently became her wife. “And I think that’s the part of the letting go and the moving on that is the toughest. That there’s this understanding that that piece of me is gone, and I’m not going to get it back. And I don’t know who I am without being able to express myself with a football.”
In my forthcoming book Soccer Dad (Disruption Books, 2026), I write:
We’re not a religious family. But Scout and I have shared the quote from Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, explaining to his skeptical sister why he’s going to put off a Christian mission to continue his running career.
“I believe God made me for a purpose,” Liddell tells her, “but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”
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