Final post, part 3, Montaigne, friends, teammates and the loser's award

"Oh friends there are no friends." {read post 1 first]

While I was not the best teammate I could have been I could certainly recognize a good one, then and now (easier to be a critic.)

My friend Matt was a good football player but only an ok -- at best -- basketball player. But he worked like a dog, came to every practice or camp, never complained, did what was asked, and was a heck of lot of fun. Come senior year our coach contemplated cutting him and replacing him with a better player, but a worse person. He knew he had a good team coming in to the year and was trying to make a name for himself with other local coaches. But despite overcoaching like this he had the good sense to come to me and another top player to mention the possibility.

We made it clear that this would be a bad idea and he reconsidered. Girls might have hidden this story from him but, being boys, we ran directly to Matt to taunt him and insist he thank us -- he did gleefully.

 Matt made the team. He was a great practice player Saturday morning when we were all exhausted from Friday night play (and then playhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFx6gm0QKZ0). And the cheerleaders loved him. They literally squealed when he came in the last minutes of a blow out game and struggled to get the ball up the court. He must have set some record for 10 second backcourt violations. We would almost fall off the bench laughing -- and he would laugh even harder at himself after the game. Even with Matt our school team had the best record it had had in twenty years.

At the end of the year banquet our coach awarded Matt "The Most Dedicated Teammate" award. We laughed, of course, because we were teenagers and happy to tease him about not getting real playing time. That is what such awards are for we joked. Matt's Dad, however, took it a bit more seriously.

"Loser's award," he grumbled as he stalked off with that grumpy white male thing of his generation.
 

Fortunately, Matt  had the wherewithal (and then some) to laugh off his own father. Indeed, almost every time we get together we laugh hysterically about the "loser's award" remark.

You see, Matt, the "loser" best teammate, became easily the most successful person I know, financially, professionally and personally. Hundreds of people and clients depend on him daily for their livelihood. He is a wonderful father and husband that helps out all members of his large, extended Irish family. He has done more for our old "friends" in times of trouble than the government -- and where we came from that's saying something. He is the one friend I call when I really need help. He always answers. He serves on local hospital boards, gives thousands to charities, takes people places they otherwise wouldn't go. There aren't many English professors sitting behind Jimmy Howard at Wing's playoff game.

I like to think I benefit from his generosity because I am a friend. But whether or not that is true that "friendship" began because he knew how to be a teammate. Work on being a good teammate. You can always do that. It is like defense in basketball. Everyone can do it. Just work at it. It wins games of all sorts.

[That's it, Soph. Last post. It has been a lot fun watching you and the girls play. My thanks, in particular, to All World -- who knows how to be a team mate and then some. And thanks to Cookie for being a pro even when I am not sure there should be pro's. I hope he doesn't mind how exposed he is now to googlers, but this blog will stay up for the duration. Next year? Who knows? But goodbye to Cookie's Purple U12 blog]

Final post, part 2, Montaigne, friendship, teammates, and the loser's award

"Oh, friends, there are no friends" -- but there are teammates, just as there are citizens, neighbors, and colleagues. Try for friends, of course. But the ideal is so hard to reach. Citizenship, neighborliness, collegiality, teamwork -- those are achievable and just require work. Everyone can contribute.

Montaigne did not play youth soccer or, at least, soccer as we know it. But he would have liked it. Playing youth soccer provides the opportunity to learn what I learned playing basketball, American football, hockey, and baseball as a kid. I hope my daughter learns what I learned -- I am recording it here in part for that purpose. Maybe she will read it one day:)

But I hope, too, she doesn't forget what she has learned and has to, as I am doing in adulthood, relearn those lessons.

As an academic you can get snotty and distance yourself from basic life lessons. You develop a particular distaste for cliches about "team". And you develop a particular distaste for middle American life and values (if it weren't for football Ann Arbor and the rest of the State of Michigan would be in a civil war). Consequently, as a young adulthood I distanced myself from much of my youth to pursue "higher" endeavors and this meant distancing myself from my earlier life in sports. Only when my daughter started running around -- rather quickly, I noticed, with remarkable endurance -- did I return to sports as a soccer dad (of course, the one team sport I knew nothing about).

It has been a (skeptical) pleasure. I devoted too much time to athletics as a kid, but there was much good I had forgotten.

I learned long ago, for example, how to be a teammate. I just forgot it. That is, I learned how to work in a supportive fashion with a group even if members of that group were not my friends or my family. Indeed, I learned how to work in a supportive fashion with a group even when I downright disliked some of that group (and vice versa). Those lessons, I realize now, are helping now be a better neighbor, citizen, and colleague. Teammates find a way to help each other be better as a group. They compete with one another certainly -- but only to make the group better. It is that simple. And it is a wonderful idea and anyone can follow it. Coaches sometimes have to criticize, make tough decisions, etc. -- but teammates? Find a way to make the group better. One task. Don't like somebody? Who cares? Think you are better than others? May be you are. So what? Make the team better.

As a kid I was a good team mate, but not a great one. I could have been much better. Unfortunately, in retrospect, as I got to be a better player I probably became a worse teammate. As a team captain in football I recall (only recently) yelling at another player to work harder. The coach said, "That is my job. I yell at them if needed. Your job is to make them feel better and play after I yell at them. 'Say something like, come on, go show the SOB he is wrong about you.'"

Final post, part one, Montaigne, friends, teammates, and the loser's award

"Oh my friends there are no friends..."

This is a famous apostrophe (a figure of speech from classical rhetoric wherein a speaker utters a provocative but unfinished phrase, most often one that tries to express deep emotion) sometimes ascribed to Aristotle. But it really gained traction in the 16th century French writer Michel Montaigne's Essay on Friendship. Montaigne, along with Shakespeare, was perhaps the clearest thinker in terms of explicating the emergence of the modern individual.

That is, sometime in the Renaissance people began thinking of themselves not just as members of a community (consensus fidelium -- the group of faithful under God in religious terms) but as distinctive individuals, each with a unique existence. For the most part, we tend to think of this as good thing: it led, for example, to the notion of individual rights built in to the American constitution. But, this transition also led to what former SNL writer and current US Senator Al Franken humorously called the "ME" decade of the 1970s where Americans, in particular, got consumed with themselves not as a country full of citizens helping one another but as narcissistic, solipsistic, autonomous actors.

Since at least Montaigne's time, then, we have lived with a certain tension: how do we live as distinctive individuals -- something we can't help but prize -- but still function as part of a collective? To put it more simply, how do we relate to non-familial others as others and not some extension of our selves? Western civilization has provided all sorts of wonderful terms to help with this -- neighbor, for example -- or, fellow citizen -- in academia or some professions the word colleague is very useful. All these terms help define and clarify healthy and productive relationships.

These generally positive terms, however, have something of a "dark" side because they mark a boundary between the most intimate and difficult to achieve (and thus most desirable) relationship between individuals: friendship. True friends are hard to come by. Most adults, if lucky, tend to count them on one hand. It is, in many respects, a mark of adulthood. As a jr. high kid or even as a college student we believed we had thousands of "friends." It is only later that we realize we need other terms for most of those relationships just as Facebook needs different layers of privacy.

This is, in part, what Montaigne was getting at when he said "Oh friends there are no friends." We address each other as such, we want more friendships certainly, but we realize the difficulty and rarity of such relationships. This is particularly true in the modern world where the onus is on the individual to care exclusively for himself or herself and his or her family. Who has time to really build a friendship? We had time when we kids and thus many of our "friends" our childhood friends.

And there is a certain melancholy sadness to this, of course. The pain of discovering someone you thought was a friend is not a friend is excruciating. Such is life.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj1Cy3YtK9w

But it is for that reason we should learn to celebrate the more achievable kinds of positive relationships: as I get older I appreciate more and more those who are good citizens. They volunteer and serve on boards and treat me well. I love my neighbors who don't impinge on my privacy and are civil. Good colleagues at work who do their jobs without blurring boundaries are a treasure. Correspondingly, as I get older I work harder and harder to be good neighbor, a good citizen, and a good colleague.

I am, in fact, re-learning lessons I learned long ago -- and then abandoned in young adulthood -- about how to be a good teammate -- another very useful term and concept. Had I paid more attention to my understanding of being a teammate and honoring what that meant I would have saved myself a lot of time.

Championship Game -- Force take it 1-0 over Jags White!

Booom...there it is! Or something like that.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5IS45jT468

The Force Girls wrapped up their spring season and their time with Coach Cookie with a hard fought 1-0 win over the Novi Jags White squad.

This was not a thing of beauty in 90 degree bright sun, but there were beautiful moments. Let me start with the single goal in the second half as it says much about the girls and Cookie's work with them over the last two years. Indeed, as fate would have it, the game and championship winner was one of the more spectacular goals of the last two years -- a team effort that combined skill, brains, communication, training, and toughness.

The play began at midfield with Zoe finding her way to the ball on the slanted west side of the pitch where most of the game's action took place. Vintage Zoe here. She anticipated the Jags pass, intercepted it, controlled, changed direction herself, and then changed the point of attack by sending it across to MSH. MSH caught up with it and took a hard hit and -- wonder of wonders -- got the call. Emmi stepped up from the backline apparently to send the free kick into the box with one her bombs, but MSH, with a quick hand gesture and nod, waved her on for what amounted to a delayed overlap -- if not what could be called a set piece. Emmi reacted immediately and looped around MSH who then sent her a nice touch pass down the right side. Emmi, playing like a skilled forward, took a touch or two and sent a nice cross to Lauren who snagged it at the top of the box. Lauren in turn dropped it to her left for Jazzy to do what Jazzy does -- finish. She eyed the far left post and nailed it just inside.

This marvelous goal let loose a burst of bottled up offensive energy. Sawyer made a great run down the left and got off a hard strike. Jazzy then sent one to Sawyer in the box where she got knocked down with no call. Jazzy tried again a few minutes later and Sawyer tapped it over the net. Lauren sent a terrific stretch pass to MSH who went in alone only to be stymied by a great diving save by the Jag's keeper. It easily could have been 5-0 with a little luck.

Defense won this though. Rockstar, probably still fuming after yesterday, put on a clinic. She seemed to snag every ball -- right foot, left foot, in the air, on the ground -- and if the Jags did get penetration deep she frustrated the Jag's sidelines by bouncing the ball off a white player to get the throw in. Simply put, she made the difficult look easy for 70+ minutes.

Throw-ins? Emmi may have torn a rotator cuff as she took upwards of 20, providing an incredible weapon when she wasn't making plays from the backline. Rocksteady took a hard hit early -- a Jags run at a vulnerable player -- and there was hushed moment when she stayed down. But when she got up she never stopped again, winning ball after ball as the shorthanded defenders played through the whole game. At one point in the first half a streaking Jags forward threatened to cross the top of the box when Rocksteady brought her to a halt with a tackle only to, seconds later, have to take the rebound of her own tackle off her stomach when the Jags trailer found a way to it. Grace, as part of the wall on a free kick, gamely took one off her leg to stop an opportunity and in the second half worked hard with Rhea to clear when a late corner kick caused a scramble.

Even though the Force had taken over the game the last few minutes were tough. Sawyer's Dad forgot his watch so no one knew how much time was left. Kate brilliantly ate up minutes when she could. Parents paced. And then -- there it was -- an opportunity to play in the fall against the GR Crew.

One more wrap post tomorrow when "Cookie's Purple U12 Force" officially shuts down.

On to the Finals, 6-1!!!

The next to the last game of the season turned in to a route as the Force rolled past Canton Celtic White 6-1 to win the semi-final of Divsion 2 U13Y and the right to take on the Novi Jags White tomorrow AM.

The game was never really in doubt. Canton had to play early in the day (a 4-2 win over Waza) and in 90 degree heat the effort showed. Canton came out flat footed and the Force -- well shaded by Rocsteady's Dad's tents -- looked strong. Stasia had several runs down the left side and some nice combinations with Grace. Emmi, who has just been playing incredibly well, stepped in and up and made plays early on to give some backline push to the offense.

Still, it seemed to take a while for the first goal. Lauren sent a wonderful cross from the right side that flew by the keeper. Sawyer hustled it down near the far side line and returned the favor. Jazzy, always well positioned in front, was the beneficiary. 1-0.

Minutes later  Stasia and Lauren applied terrific pressure, keeping the ball in front of the keeper and Jazzy, again, finished with a nice crossover step. 2-0

There were some intervening minutes while Zoe danced beautifully with the ball, in and out of the box, looking for opening. Her skill in close quarters is really getting striking -- but no goals.

Emmi's Herculean throw-in led to goal 3. Kyra took it artfully off her leg and found superstiker Sawyer. 3-0.

Then we had what is known in soccer parlance as an oopsie. Rockstar, in a rare moment of human frailty, lost a 1-1 battle with a quietly skilled and quick Canton forward. 3-1.

In the second half, however, things were all Force, even though Canton came out with some surprising energy (the Force turned from their ball possession game to rely on skill alone and this created some problems).

Kyra brilliantly snagged one out of the air and sent a pretty pass to Jazzy for Kyra's second assist and Jazzy's hat trick. This goal was sharp, just inside the far post. 4-1.

Superstriker took advantage of the golden five minutes to get a break, gracefully settle the ball, and score. 5-1.

Rockstar wasn't satisfied, however. Getting a rare chance at forward she held the midfield line well and sprinted past the Canton defenders when the ball popped lose. Running at full tilt, ponytail flying and eyes blazing, this blogger got ready for a full on blast. But she saw the keeper come way out to try to force a mistake and provided one of the prettiest dekes this side of Pavel Datsyuk.

6-1.

The rest of the evening was spent watching the Novi Jaguars Green 01  lose in a shoot-out to the Novi Jaguars White 00. This was some show.

New 850K soccer pitch at Gitmo!

Solving the problem of field conditions

http://www.city-soccer.org/ny-rooftop/http://www.city-soccer.org/ny-rooftop/

Click on the link above for a remarkable NYC (Harlem) story on roof top soccer.