Butterflies, Attack!

The Terror of Strongsville: The Butterflies!

It’s 9am and the girls take the field. I understand that as you get older, space is more constrained and you might have to play at 7am, but Strongsville soccer has only four 5-year-old girls soccer teams and so there is enough space that you can split the teams into two games and give everyone more playing time. Each team has a distinct color – red, yellow, blue, green. Chiara is on the red team.

The girls get to pick their team name. Chiara’s team – clearly intending to strike terror in the hearts of their opponents – chose the name The Butterflies. It’s reflective of their competitive spirit. Many of the five-year-olds haven’t grabbed onto the concept of competing, winning and losing. Our hats go off to our energetic coach, Josh, who does his best to keep them as motivated as possible. He arranges cones, does drills, and plays the role of five-year-old coach perfectly.

There are no real soccer skills, per se, on the Butterflies. There is more a range in terms of assertiveness in pursuing the ball. At one end of this spectrum, girls go after the ball with reckless abandon, grabbing shirts and pushing others out of the way, irrespective of which team the shirt owner belongs to. Other girls on the team have all the aggression of daffodils. They’re mainly spectators in the game, keenly interested in seeing, up close, who will kick the ball again. Our team will literally sit and wait for the other team to kick the ball as if it were their turn. Sigh.

Unfortunately, this week we are paired against the Green Team, who does in fact have per se soccer skills. These girls can dribble and they kick booming goals. They also are all good at attacking the ball. Basically, we lost this game on draft day. The league is like Basketball in the Olympics – the other three teams are all playing to determine who will win silver to Green’s Dream Team gold.

The assistant coach is assigned to our field. She tries to maintain a fun and carefree environment. “Who wants to throw in the ball?” she sings. “Keep it up!” Chiara’s parents, with MBA’s from Harvard, are having none of that. “This is a disaster” says Andrea “Spread out! Get up the field!” Her comments are bigger-picture, field presence stuff. I’m amused she thinks that four five-year-olds can coordinate their positions. My comments are more individual, tactical. “Attack the ball!” I shout to pig-tailed girl with a happy face who skips down the field.

I have a tendency to get into sporting events too much. I can go watch two little league baseball teams on which I do not know a single child, will choose one side at random, and become the most vociferous fan of that team. I also like to use humor. I think I’m being a tremendous wit. Andrea thinks I’m being an obnoxious loudmouth.  Today is no exception. “Shoot, shoot, shoot… Woohoo!” I shout, in a game amongst five-year-olds where no score is taken and standings don’t matter. The other parents sit blithely in their folding chairs reading Facebook on their I-Phones. Many of them have older sibling children – they’ve been down this road before.

There’s no keeping score at this level. But we know, we know. By the second half, the Butterflies are getting murdered 7 to 2, and Andrea is praying that I don’t say anything offensive. She and I start talking strategy. Some teams put a girl back in goal to defend. Given most scores in this league are uncontested rolls into an open goals, simply putting a body in the way, however immobile, has the effect of reducing scoring dramatically. It also allows you to provide at least one player some rest without taking them out of the game. The others, racing up and down the field in a huddled mass, exhaust themselves and are begging to be subbed out by the fourth quarter.

For his part, Cody is not pleased to be sitting still on the sidelines watching girls play soccer. To entertain himself, when he’s not dumping Chiara’s ice water down his shorts, he takes to a particularly vicious version of the Robert Kimmel School of sports cheering. “I hate the Green Team!” He shouts “I want to kill them!” I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty certain Cody’s team next year will not be named The Butterflies.

Another 10-minute quarter later, the game comes to an end. The Butterflies have had some lucky breaks on both offense and defense. The green team has scored another 3 goals to our 2 to make the score 10 to 4. Given the number of near misses to the outside, we’re lucky the score wasn’t 50 to 4. The girls, oblivious to the loss, shake hands and go get treats. Andrea and I sigh and pack up our chairs – needing a rest after expending too much energy on a game that strangely somehow mattered and didn’t matter at the same time.