Dear Soccermom: Advice Columnist

This week I have decided to take some questions from followers and become an advice columnist, a la Amy Sedaris in the Believer magazine. I've never tried this before, so feel free to let me know how you think I’m doing....





Dear Soccermom,
Running makes me queasy. Any advice?
- Couchpotatoe

Dear Dan Quayle,
You neglect to mention what you are running away from. Muggers? 1980’s fashion icons? Conservative politicians? In these situations I think the queasiness is not to be avoided but could actually come in handy. When you run, just turn your head slightly to the side and speed up a bit, so that you actually puke in their path. If you could puke up whole, unmasticated banana peels, that would be helpful too, because they might slip on one and fall. Can you do that? That would be so cool.

If you are running towards something, like a soccer ball, that is different. Forget the queasiness and suck it up, cupcake.

Hope this helps!
- Cathy

Dear Soccermom,
My children are making me insane. No matter what I say, no matter what I do, they scoff, laugh outright, or pretend to spray water out of their mouths. Is there something I missed in parenting 101?
Yours,
- At wits end

Dear Witless,
Yes. And lucky for you, I teach parenting 101, so just this once I’ll give you some freebies. First of all, forget the pretending-- spit-spray actual water back at them. (Or withhold water or other liquids from them altogether, until they become parched and feeble. ) Alternatively, you could pin them down on their backs and as you hover above them, let a long trail of your spit dangle towards their faces. Suck the spit up at the last minute. (Or don’t-- your choice.)

Another option would be to put them in some kind of after school activity they hate, just to wring all the joy out of their lives, so they are broken and sad. Not soccer—all kids love soccer—but something boring and tedious like ballet. They won’t have any spirit left to scoff at you.
Cheers!
- Cathy

Dear Soccermom,
My husband is a real sports fan, and I try to watch it with him sometimes, despite knowing next to nothing about sports. Recently we watched a soccer match. My husband began to yell, “Handball! Handball!” I didn’t know what to make of this, so I reached into his crotch. He was startled at first, then annoyed, then, I think, pleased. Apparently, I misunderstood. Are there any other soccer terms I should be wary of?
- Earnest but confused

Dear Earnest,
Don’t worry, you didn’t misunderstand at all. That’s exactly what‘s supposed to happen when someone yells “handball”, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It also explains, to some extent, the high nature of David Beckham’s voice, and the need for handballs to sometimes be followed by “penile T kicks”. (Never learned what the “T” stood for, sorry.) Since you asked, you might want to watch out for the soccer expression “Man on”, which can signal either that another player is chasing you while you have the ball, or hot gay action, or both.
Best,
- Cathy

My Triumphant Return

I’ve been waiting to write this blog for a long time. Today was my glorious, long-awaited return to the soccer field. It was...okayish.

April 20, six months after my ACL surgery, seemed like the right time to play again, partially because this is what all the ACL literature says is the right amount of time to wait, and partially because my physiotherapist told me to stop coming in. (Kicked me out, really.) The fact that April 20 is the international day to celebrate cannabis culture (“420, dude!” ) doesn’t have anything to do with it, although, when I think about it, smoking a spliff before playing might have helped me relax.

There’s not much to say. Here are the facts:

- The weather was perfect.

- I got there early and did the warm-up that FIFA recommends to prevent knee injuries. Being early also allowed me plenty of important time for worrying.

- It was truly great to see my old friends out on the field again. And it turns out my ability to take the piss out of people was not at all damaged when I hurt my knee. (Sample comment by me, when someone flubbed a pass: “What was that?!”)

- I played goal, mostly, which involved a lot more standing than playing. My choice.

- I spent a lot of time running to get the ball when it rolled off the field after someone missed a shot. I did this on purpose, since it meant I was actually getting exercise, but the likelihood it would cause me to twist and hurt my knee was dramatically less than it would have been in a game. Smart, right?

- I was responsible for at least three goals-- for the other team, mind you, not mine-- don’t be ridiculous. I let them in since I was much too afraid to dig in and defend properly.

- I left early, and when I left, a lot of my friends clapped at me, I guess congratulating me on my triumphant return, but I couldn’t help but wonder if they were actually clapping since I was leaving, and they would finally not have to walk on eggshells and could take some normal damn shots already.

In the past, I’ve always been the one who stays and plays til the bitter end. Leaving early made me feel very mature. Look at me, not pushing myself too hard! Look at me, doing the responsible thing!

But later I realized, of course, that I’m not mature. I’m a chickenshit.

But I'm a soccer-playing chickenshit. Ha!

Tabletop Karate Chop

The place I go for physio is covered in framed sports team pictures and team jerseys, all with handwritten notes of thanks from players who are now presumably injury free, and back doing their sport of choice. This is a good thing, because it is a reminder that you won’t be doing this kind of tedious rote exercise forever, and the annoying stuff that you’re doing right now isn’t permanently replacing fun kinds of exercise, like, uh, soccer.

The people working there are all impossibly fit and cheerful, and laugh as they see your face when they tell you to do 150 squats, hamstring and butt lifts, or to kneel on your knee mere weeks after someone cut and drilled into it. Unlike us regular folks, none of them have ever been injured; they look like the kind of people who treat their bodies as finely tuned machines, which they re-energize with fuel every two hours by perhaps eating a half a cup of chickpeas or a handful of kumquats, or a spoonful of mashed yeast. Travis, my physiotherapist, does iron man triathlons in 12 hours. How frustrating it must be for him to deal with us mere mortals all day who refuel with beer and bacon sandwiches. But he tries with us, he really tries.

The other day, Travis pulled a rope ladder out of a drawer and showed it to me after I’d been riding the stationary bike for a while. “Are we escaping to somewhere?” I asked hopefully.

Alas, no. He put the rope ladder on the ground and asked me to walk along inside it, stepping in each square with one footstep. While he watched. Frowning. When I finished, he said “Okay, do it again.”

I did. Then he said “Try lifting your injured leg higher, like marching.” Apparently, he explained, I’ve been dragging my injured leg around like a suitcase with wheels, and my hurt leg needed to do some work of its own, by marching. I get the idea behind it. But I feel I don’t speak only for myself when I say that sweaty, limping people who do not look especially great in workout gear aren’t too keen on being watched and frowned at while they march in squares under fluorescent lights.

After the marching, he was still frowning. “Okay, now try sideways,” he said. At this point, when I realized I was both sidestepping and goosestepping through the flat rope ladder, I might have scoffed, because Travis tried to make light of what he’d asked me to do. “Think of it like dancing,” he said. “I learned all my best dance moves by doing exactly what you’re doing right now.”

Stepping 12 steps to one side, and then back again? “Travis, you must be a terrible dancer,” I said.

“What?! No way,” he said. “You haven’t seen my tabletop karate chop.”

“That’s true,” I admitted.

Even with all the frowning, I’m so thankful he taught me to walk again. And in a few months, he’ll teach me to run again, and then soccer is just around the corner. I was thinking of taking him some xmas cookies as a thank you, but then I realized that surely he would never eat anything unhealthy like that. I’m thinking I'll just put the cookies together with my thank you note and frame them and he can hang them in the physio room with all the jerseys.

Blind Soccer

As soon as I start to feel wistful and wimpy and sorry for myself for not getting to play soccer, my sister sends me this link about blind soccer players. There’s a World Blind Football Championship played every few years (this year Brazil was the winner). It’s really inspiring to watch and makes me feel exceptionally guilty for complaining about my temporary injury.

If you’re like me, and wondering ‘how on earth would blind soccer work?', I’ll give you the short version. The players use a ball that has bearings in it so they can hear it coming. There’s no throw-ins, and they play on smaller fields. The goalies can see. (In the clip I watched, the goalies seem perhaps even more psycho angry when they got scored on than some of the FIFA World Cup goalies – I guess you feel like a pretty serious knob when you can see, and you’re using a smaller net than usual, and a blind player can still score on you. I even saw one goalie score an own goal. Hee hee.)

It’s all very carefully edited on youtube, of course, so we don’t see what must be part of it-- the moments when everyone is standing around and no one has the ball. (The sighted goalie has to stay in his goalie box, otherwise, I’d imagine he’d be tempted to run up and swipe it from people all the time.) I was at first a bit disappointed that I saw only individual scoring efforts—you know, someone dribbling up with the ball, and dekeing around the defenders by himself to score, rather than give and go passes—but then I had to remind myself dude, they’re blind. It’s easy to forget because they’re very good.

If I was in charge of blind soccer, there’s only a few things I would change. First of all, why must they wear those masks that look like they’ve been cut out of sanitary pads? I understand the idea of wearing a mask, naturally, because some blind people have slightly more sight than others and this could provide an obvious advantage, but can’t they make the masks cool and black, like something Batman might wear? It would be much sexier. Also, the trophy they win in the end – does it have to look like a clear glass vase someone picked up at the dollar store? I know they’re blind, but they just won the blind World Cup. Let’s give them an actual trophy. And lastly, let’s not spray them with champagne in the end, when they do win. The poor fellows just stand there kind of sadly, getting wet, because they can’t see enough to know how to escape the spray, and they’re not frolicking in the joy of it, they’re just putting up with it.

Otherwise, it’s all good. You should watch it.