World Cup Calendar
Although we advocate playing soccer who can’t help watching the World Cup! For your convenience here is a calendar of match times.
What I learned at Burning Man and Why I Play Soccer
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.
Why Winning Is Almost Everything
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?
Blast from the Past – SSC vs Real Espana Game Report
GAME SIX REPORT: SSC 0 – REAL ESPANA 2 and… THE HEACOCK THAT ALMOST MADE HISTORY May, 27th 2012
Sorry folks that game six summary is fairly somber compared to last week’s report. If you are short on time don’t miss the report on Brian’s history making penalty shot attempt in the last section. The somber tone?…It’s partly due to the fact that we were simply out classed by the best team in the division. No excuses… No one to blame… We lost to a better team. We put up a respectable fight but it was no match for their excellent passing and dribbling up through the midfield. We sorely missed the firepower of Greg F, Greg C, Stephen and Baron and our streaky but injured Winger, Izzy).
This was a game in which my personal highlight was defiantly pointing to their prodigiously speedy, skinny as a rope European midfielder who made a shot attempt and then three seconds later made an even worse attempt at diving in the goal box – the ref didn’t buy it. Like a real big man, I pointed my finger at him while he lay on the ground and I said,
“You’re Diving… I don’t like that”.
He got up and with disdain on his face and chin held high says to me, “You will NEVER be as FAST as me”. I did not expect this zinger of a dagger and remained silent… but of course in my mind I thought… “You little fucker… of course your scrawny 31 year old ass is faster… No duh.” Now lets play some soccer 
The other reason for the more lucid mood is that Ignacio quote en quote “FORGOT” the bag of Mate powder that so helped our team last week and inspired fiery imagination of this game report author. Apparently Jimmy saw the bag in Ignacio’s car after the game. This purposeful act of deceit and negligence (along with injuring a teammate in practice) coupled with his attempt to get Red-Carded in the first 120 seconds of play has made us question his loyalty to the team… plus Larz heard him speak Spanish to the referee with a strange Chilean accent (do we need any more proof to dust off the Bad Apple policy for such (in Rick’s words) “Diabolical” actions?).
Thank Goodness We Have a Mohel On Hand
On an uplifting note the day was characterized more by events off-the-field than the game itself. Eytan brought his eight day old baby boy to the game for a very emotional and spiritual early morning Bris ceremony held amongst the shelter of Redwood trees not more than a few yards South of Ragle Field #4. The intimate ceremony was attended by a few of us men who arrived early at 8am for the special occasion (after this I have just about seen it all here in Sebastopol – in terms of New-Age bastardizations of sacred 1000 year old cultural traditions). It was not for the feint of heart (gentiles you can Google Brit Milah) but we felt honored that Eytan took our Thursday practice jabs about not inviting us to the Men’s blessing way to heart. Arie gets credit as he gave Eytan proper reassurance that he was once a semi-professional Mohel (for those who do not know Arie’s past… that was in the days before the 1967 Summer of Love when he realized he would rather clip trees and bushes as a landscaper (Yes drinking the Kool-Aid can change careers).
WHAT ABOUT THE GAME? Did we lose? I forgot already.
MINUTE 1 to 43… Pressure, Pressure, Pressure by Real Espana… Some excellent saves by Rick in goal box… Notable one being the time when three “offsides” forwards, unchallenged, dribbled to about ten feet from goal. As he came in Rick stared him down not committing to an angle… and the oncoming striker broke under pressure and could not decide what to do until he blew his last minute dead on shot to the right. A few nice counter attacks by SSC.
MINUTE 44… Another penalty called outside the goal box against SSC. Great shot on goal by Real Espana. Bounces off keepers hand. No teammates to help… Real Espana player runs in from the wall to hit the ball back into the net. The intense display of emotion and whooping and hollering from the lucky fellow was evidence that Real Espana was getting very nervous about not scoring after 44 minutes of play. So we made them worried… that’s a positive!
MINUTE 75… Real Espana hits a beautiful high arcing bouncing ball right down the middle of the field between two (nameless) defenders and the striker taps it in for goal number 2 (I was pleased that I was able to identify the bird that caught my eye circling above during that unfortunate moment, it was a Red-Tailed hawk. Yes, all three of us back there felt we should have stopped it.
MINUTE 80… THE HEACOCK THAT ALMOST MADE HISTORY
There is always a game highlight right? Well we had ours during minute 80. Real history in the making… or so we thought. After ten good minutes of pressure by SSC we get the break we need… a foul in the box by Real Espana. Penalty kick awarded to SSC.
Brian, being our coach and inspirational leader, knew at that moment that we needed something special to lift our spirits. No ordinary penalty kick was going to do it. So he dusted off a move that was so audacious and bold that it had not been tried in some 20 years (except for a few Eastern European soccer clubs who still practice it to this day during penalty shoot-outs). Brian grabbed Ryan and whispered, “I am going to do THE HEACOCK” (At least this is what Ryan told me).
After the game we learned that this was a move with such a high degree of difficulty that Brian had not tried it since he did it with smashing success to win his final high school game at the 1984 Regional North Bay Championship game. The idea for the set piece tactic came from an Alcohol fueled dare made by Ben Ziemer the night before after downing what was then known as a Ziemer Chaser, where the party host cuts a soccer ball in half and inserts a tube at the bottom then fills it with beer… no need to explain the rest. Needless to say Brian agreed to try it if the opportunity arose. And it did and Brian’s shot was the stuff of local soccer legend for years until Micheal Jackson’s Thriller video came out and all was forgotten.
As we learned, THE HEACOCK is a daring set piece stunt where the penalty shot taker intentionally rebounds the ball off of the goalie to his on-rushing accomplice who taps it in goal… AMAZINGLY Brian almost pulled it off. Ryan let the team down by miffing the execution and shanking the ball over the net. HATS OFF TO BRIAN… Had Ryan knocked it in we would have been fired up beyond belief and Sonoma County Mens Soccer League history would have been made. (Sorry for throwing you under the bus Ryan – but someone has to call it out).
Good night teammates,
Josh