by sebastopol-soccer | Mar 14, 2014 | Uncategorized |
A good ten years ago my college buddy invited me to Burning Man. Sure, I had heard of it before. It was a wild party in the desert. Why not, let’s go. My friend Pete Apicella flew out from New York with elaborate costume entail. The very fisrt thing he did was tape a crude cardboard sign to the back of my car. It read:
“No Spectators, Only Participants”
He was obsessed with this phrase and waxed poetic about it for hours on the car ride over the Sierras towards Nevada. Other cars with bikes and tons of gear would honk and give us high fives. What was all this enthusiasm about? Pretty much impossible to really get it until you are there.
Arriving at Burning Man was a religious experience. 10,000 people at that time camped in a giant half arc stretching for almost a mile. What immediately stood out was that there were no headliners to this concert. No main act. Nothing even for sale anywhere except one small Burning Man sponsored beer, coffee, and ice stand. The people were the party. The people were the happening. Every camp had a DJ. Every camp had dancers, wild costumes, food to share.
How does this all relate to soccer? A few years later I had the epiphany that playing REAL soccer would be way more fun than watching sports on TV. And sure enough the drama of the competition of your own team makes even the SuperBowl seem non-important. And of course the health benefits of excercise are obvious.
by sebastopol-soccer | Mar 14, 2014 | Uncategorized |
Winning a fair played game against another team is our highest ambition as a club.
To win is a measure of our skill, teamwork, and organization as a club. In about 98% percent of this country these statments would be self-evident and so obvious as to not be worth mentioning. But we do not live in the valley, the lowlands, the red states, the corn belt, the Eastern sea board. We live in the West County and like many I was raised to believe that winning was bad and that all competition was evil.
Forward thinking parents like mine enrolled their children in droves into Recreational soccer. In pure ignorance and defiance it was thought of as the “non-sport”.
“Soccer” was a sport of no physical contact, team work, good excercise and earnest coaches who had never played the sport fostering an environment of peace and empathy.
Believe it, they did this with good intention. Their own personal experiences with baseball and football, where coaches spit on their players and parents fight each other and team moms conive to cheat, jaded them towards thinking there was anything remotely noble about winning. And who can blame them. A culture of “Winning” without proper perspective inevitably leads to bad sportsmanship, performance enhancing drugs, shortcuts, and a disregard for fellow athletes.
So out of this existential wreckage and moral relativism I have come to see more clearly why winning is important.
While statements such as, “let’s just go out and have some fun” seem innocent enough there is an insidious undercurrent of denial in such statements. Soccer is not a casual random activity – It’s improve theater with unspoken rules. There is choreography to the spacing and position of players. There is teamwork and strategy. It’s performance art and the referee is keeping score.
In the ideal world, winning is a reflection that we are doing things right and that we are playing to the best of our abilities. Winning holds people accountable for doing what’s best for the team. Take for example, the clever striker who prides themselves on their ability to dribble through traffic. It’s all too often this person will fancy their own skill so much that they will never make a timely pass to the detriment of the team. But it will be rationalized in their own minds that they are the only ones who can do such fancy dribbling and isn’t this what soccer is all about anyways? A focus on winning keeps these self indulgent moments in check. Did you make the pass to the wide open teammate standing at the top of the goalbox instead of trying that really difficult shot from the corner? Did you hustle back on defense? Do you communicate with your teammates?
