I love soccer, though I have never been very good at it. I played from second grade until 10th grade, when I moved to a bigger high school and couldn't make the team. In that 8-year span I scored a total of 2 goals, one of which came off a lucky bounce off my knee in a scrimmage.

When I lived in Tennessee in fourth, fifth grade I played on a travel team that included second-graders and up, because in the 1980s in Tennessee there were few players and no organized soccer at the school level. We had one good player on our team, a German exchange student named Guido. Our game strategy was to get the ball to Guido and have him dribble through the entire opposing defense and score. (Our coaches' knowledge of soccer technique and strategy was limited by their being American men in rural Tennessee in the 1980s.)

One game when our regular goalkeeper was unavailable, I filled in and made a great, leaping save. I jumped at the top of the goal box, stretched my arms skyward, snatched the rocketing ball out of the air and came down with it in my hands. That save may have been the high point of my career in organized soccer. Thereafter I became the team's regular goalie. A game later, Guido made what I now understand to be a basic soccer play -- he passed the ball backward to me, the goalie. I stood and watched the ball roll past me into the goal. It had never occurred to me that someone could pass the ball backward. I was too stunned to move, and I will never forget the look of exasperation Guido gave me as the ref awarded the other team a goal.

Last fall I fell into coaching both my daughters' soccer teams: a third-grade team and a kindergarten team. I never wanted to be a soccer coach, nor have I harbored any illusions that I had impressive skills or tactics to bequeath to budding athletes. Most of what I know I've pieced together from watching World Cup games and being yelled at when I mess up during rec league indoor soccer games. All I remember from practices as a kid are running laps, dribbling through cones, and scrimmaging.

I often feel lost leading a soccer practice. I can't tell if the girls learn anything over the course of a practice session, let alone an individual drill. I try to keep things moving and focus them on activities that are fun, but sometimes it's challenging. I have no idea what to do when, minutes into the second practice of the season, one kindergartner says, "Soccer practice is boring!" then all the other girls start chanting along. I have no idea what to do, toward the end of a particularly trying practice, when a player ignores you four times when you ask her to give you the ball because she's too busy blowing raspberries in the air. (But I've learned that if your goal is to make a 5-year-old cry, sending her to the bench for the last 10 minutes of practice does the trick!)

Often the hardest part of coaching is managing substitutions during games. It's not bad if you have 10 players total and 7 can play on the field at a time, as it is with our third-grade team; switch out 3 players halfway through each quarter, and that's that. However, our kindergarten team has 12 players, but only 4 (plus the goalie) get to be on the field at a time. Therefore, I have to substitute players twice every quarter if I want to make sure no one gets stuck sitting for 12+ minutes. So I spend the entire game with my cellphone flipped open, using the stopwatch feature to make sure I get fresh subs on every 4 minutes. To a bystander it probably looks like I'm texting while coaching.

Meanwhile, on a roster of 12 kindergarten girls, we have 9 who fight like crazy to get after every ball and boot it downfield, and 3 (including my daughter) who meander over the grass and are content to let the ball roll by without putting out a foot. So I also have to pay attention to the combinations on the field to avoid a critical mass of daisy-pickers at any given time.

As it turns out, I love being a soccer coach. I get way more excited during a kindergarten or third-grade soccer game than any dignified adult should get. When the kids run around doing their best, my heart is all the way in it. The smallest girl on the team takes her turn as goalie and makes a stop: I shout in triumph. A hard-won shot rolls just wide of the opponent's goal: I groan with sympathetic frustration. A player sprints back on defense to take away an opponent's scoring chance: I beam with pride. Last Saturday morning the third-graders strung together 4 passes in the opponent's penalty box then clanged a shot off the post. I was so proud I didn't take off my Genies shirt all day, even though we had company over.

The best moments are when I get to feel like something I have said has made a difference. When one player was stopped on a couple of scoring chances in a game last week, I pulled her aside and gave her some advice: "Next time, instead of going toward the goalie, try going around her." After that, she scored 3 times, and I felt like a real coach.

In the first half of another recent game, the kindergartners were outscored X goals to Y (the adults don't officially keep score, but the girls sure as heck do). I asked them at halftime not to wait for the other team to do something with the ball, but instead to go take the ball away. In the second half the girls came roaring back with goal after goal. It probably had nothing to do with my little speech, but the illusion sure feels nice.

Scott Beal is a stay-at-home dad, poet, educator, coach of the Bluebirds kindergarten girls soccer team, and co-coach of the Genies third grade girls soccer team.

photo by Fran Marchand