In those days I was the successful head coach of the boys' varsity team at my school, and full of my own abilities and potential. Before I took over the team had won two games in two years, but my first year as head coach saw us post our first ever winning season. I had the sense back then to let the boys find themselves as players, and developed their game around what they showed me - it was instinctive coaching rather than tactical. It was coaching by ear rather than scripting a game plan, but it was successful for several years and we went to the state playoffs twice before I was ready to step down, all full of myself as a keen tactical coach, a big game coach able to pull out wins, a player's-coach as they say in the business.
I was deluded by my own successes, but it didn't help that my son's youth teams were also wildly successful, even back during the U6 days when "winning" was an exercise in the theater of the absurd. Organize a U6 team correctly and they'll score dozens of goals per game if you have the right players. Those teams won and won and, by winning, attracted other players who also wanted to win. I saw the potential for building a dynasty.
The first in a wave of recruits arrived unceremoniously when a U8 a mother came up to me and told me that her sons were going to play on my team. You need to know the Hmong to understand how straightforward and without guile they are. She told me this very firmly and identified her two sons - one of whom was no taller than a marionette. The oldest was playing soccer in those days because he liked the snacks and juice-boxes the coaches handed out with largesse after the games, but the younger one played for the love of the game and they were tired of being on the losing end of playing against us. I knew their quality from having coached against them and I shamelessly allowed them to jump ship, to my team.
He was still out there this November day - the younger Hmong boy. He was sixteen now and still small but - again, you had to know the Hmong - an absolute warrior. In a game earlier in the season he had taken down a 19 year old player, big as a linebacker, after a dirty foul, and came up swinging. He had to be pulled away by two other players while his antagonist stumbled off bewildered and cowed but the older brother was gone now, joining a list of absent faces. He had once been the rock at the heart of our defense, the undisputed captain of the team, but something had soured in him when he turned sixteen and he became distant and hostile and no one knew why - this boy who had once played so he could get snacks, who would come off the field on a substitution and run over to his parents so he could hug the baby sister he adored. It all culminated with a fist fight between the two brothers, a sudden and quick affair that saw the younger brother humiliate the older one at a practice one day, and then he was gone. Off the team, never to return.The prodigal soccer player who did not come back . . .
We lost other players over the years, but that one was the first one to hurt my heart. Tonight I said goodbye to him too, one more time, as my boys huddled around and prepared their pre-game cheer: Iron Horse on three! One! Two! Three - IRON HORSE.
This was the last game of the season, and for many of us, the last game we would have together - yet somehow the cheer came out muted and lacked conviction. It trailed away and ended with scornful laughter as the boys pulled apart and the starters took their positions.
I looked at the other team but not with the usual scrutiny. There was nothing on the line for this one. Win or lose, both teams would remain in the middle of the table at Classic II.
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