The Tournament

My son had a soccer tournament this weekend. The last of the season. It was a two-day affair about two hours away from us in one of those in-between places where there are few hotels other than Rodeway Inn’s and Motel 6’s.

Three months ago, we were so looking forward to the season. My son had been training relentlessly all winter. After having not made the freshman team in the fall, he had been on a mission to make junior varsity next year; and, man, was he on a mission.

All winter and into the spring, he worked out with his travel team; played in pick-up games whenever he could; practiced on his own; trained at our gym; ate right… He was dogged and determined.

And then he hurt his leg. It was an injury of overuse. While I hadn’t realized it at the time, he had been playing through a nagging pain that had never abated which was more severe than I had known. I understood it to be an annoyance that came and went as his activity ebbed and flowed. Instead, it was a worsening stress on his tibia which was progressively weakening the bone.

The injury came to a head after my son joined the track team. There were several other kids from the soccer team on the track team. He saw it as a way of keeping up his running fitness for soccer. He was already in good shape; so I saw little downside and a logical upside. Two actually… The second: it gave him a chance to be with his friends.

Kids do not do enough together in person these days. Any chance for my son to see his friends, I take it.

My son’s mother was somewhat hesitant. She was concerned it would impact his grades. Pretty reasonable given his already busy schedule.

I am of the school that it is better to parent your kids to success than prevent their potential failure though. So, I saw it as an opportunity to place his goals and his responsibilities on the same table and then task him with managing them both.

If he wanted to run track, he would have to keep his grades up. If they slipped, one of the two priorities – school or sports - would have to go… and it wouldn’t be school.

The second week of track practice, my son pulled up with acute pain too severe to try to run through.

Now, had I fully understood that he had been practicing and playing through pain at all, I would have shut him down way, way sooner. Me not knowing that proved to be a symptom of a larger issue. We’ll get to that…

The injury shut him down entirely for two weeks; and then, when he had been hoping to be cleared, it shut him down for two more weeks followed by another two of only light activity.

Meanwhile, my son’s team began their soccer season without him. They played in their first tournament and then their first four games in only a nine game season.

My son… did not handle any of this well at all.

He vehemently fought against the initial two-week shutdown. He fought even harder against continuing it for another two weeks. He and I argued fiercely after the first diagnosis. We argued even more fiercely after the second. He was unreachable.

He was so entirely fixated on his one goal in all of this – making JV in the fall – he could neither listen to reason nor think rationally.

Generally, my son is not like that. He generally has a wise-minded maturity about even things that are emotional. He doesn’t wholly abandon reason no matter how strong the feelings. About this though, he did.

That became enough of an issue that I eventually had to resort to my final ‘in case of emergency, break glass’ tool for trying to snap him out of letting his emotions drive the bus.

“My first job is to keep you healthy. That’s my first job. I can fail at making you happy; I can’t fail at keeping you healthy. If I can’t trust that you can make good decisions about your health when it comes to soccer, you can’t play.”

As you can imagine, my son was not at all delighted with that line in the sand. He countered with something basically along the lines of hating me until the earth’s bubbling molten core had cooled to a pleasant room temperature if I didn’t let him play anymore.

In response, I puffed up a bit all Authoritative Dad-like and said  “If you think for a second that I would ever willfully put you in a position where I think your health is at risk because you were going to be mad at me… you may want to SERIOUSLY rethink that.”

My son knows me well enough to know that when I invoke the “This is my job. I do my job.” principle, there is an absolute mortal certainty I’m going to do what I say I will. The argument might not be over but the debate is.

The argument though… it was heated. Heated-heated. That in and of itself isn’t some groundbreaking thing. My son and I can each get heated. We can each yell; and we have - maybe not frequently but somewhere north of rarely.

The change was the intensity. This one was intensely heated.

It took place after weeks of 1) him growing more frustrated by being sidelined; and 2) me growing more frustrated from trying to nudge him back to a place of more balanced wise-mindedness without much success.

As we always do, we each quickly cooled and then talked about it calmly and put the fight to bed. I can’t say I had faith we had retired the underlying issue; but we had at least doused the fire.

A week later, he was cleared to slowly resume activities. Throughout, I just kept singing the same song on repeat: “Athletes get hurt. Managing their recovery is how they get back on the field. Taking care of their bodies is how they stay on the field. Taking care of yourself is part of being an athlete not time away from being an athlete. Rest days are part of training not missing training.”

Y’all, I should have set that to music and played it on loop, I repeated it so often.

By the time my son got back on the field, he was in a vastly better place. Having now experienced a forced hiatus, he was now worried overdoing it might bring on another one. So, he made good decisions. He skipped practice days and workouts and training when he felt like he’d be going into it not recovered from the prior. He self-managed; and when we regularly talked about how he was feeling, I believe he told me the truth knowing that I was on his side in trying to keep him on the field and not looking for reasons to pull him off.

All of that was healthy and good. It represented a rapid maturing after having derailed in a way he seldom does. It got us back to where we usually are in our relationship. And it got me back to what I’m used to: being comfortable with the freedom I give him because I trust him to handle it responsibly.

That’s a good place to be.

The getting there though… well, that took surfacing something that really didn’t have much to do with soccer at all.

Over the course of my son’s month-plus on the sidelines, while there were arguments, there were also a whole lot of conversations. From them, we got to the heart of things:

My son had taken not making the freshman team really, really hard. I had known that. But in the aftermath, what I saw as a determination to make the next team wasn’t solely that. On some level, it was also propelled by a fear of re-experiencing the same pain he did after not making the prior team. He was running from something as much as he was running toward something…

…and thing he was running from in hadn’t just been about not making it onto a soccer team.

It had also been about a complicated set of other very teenage things: Having been excluded from something he had always shared with his friends. Being good enough. Having a passion you love… and then having it taken away… and not having another to replace it.

Sometimes, for teenagers, something can feel like it was the biggest heartbreak in the world because for them in their brief years… it was.

As my son’s father, my job isn’t to protect him from those heartbreaks or keep him from feeling them. It is to build him up so that no one thing can so break his heart that he can’t get back up. They can knock him down; they can’t knock him out.

In fact, as someone who is obsessively fixated on the idea that my role is to prepare my son for a happy life beyond his childhood, I actually want him to have some heartbreaks while I’m here to help him get through them.

Those heartbreaks are opportunities for me to do what I think may be my most important job: raising my son to be resilient…

A couple days ago, I said to him “Your forced time off might have been the best thing that could have happened to you.” He looked at me like “Did you slam your head in a door or something? Are you out of your mind?”

But, ya know, it might have been. I think it was. I believe that.

Once he was fully cleared to play, my son got back onto the game roster. He managed to play the last three games of the regular season. Truth be told, all three were pretty bad games. They played badly. He had seen little of the ball. As soccer goes, they were total misses. They weren’t even good practice.

Separately though, he has also been playing in a weeknight pick-up game with mostly adults. A couple of high school kids play but they are both seniors. Most of the other players are men in their 20s. The game isn’t overly physical but it is competitive and fast.

The other night, when I went to pick him up, I made a point of getting there early so I could watch for a little while. A minute or two in, he whipped a cross into the box right onto the head of a teammate who headed it home. It was… Jesu Cristo… oh my god… a thing of beauty. A perfectly weighted ball whipped in with pace and it came in a game that my son once saw only as training but now also enjoys just as fun.

And all of this brings me to the final hurrah… The last tournament of the season this weekend.

When the tourney schedule was announced, my son was bummed to see that the tourney dates conflicted with a big music festival. He and his friends already had tickets. “I’m going to sell mine.” He told me. And then he did.

That was a month ago.

Then, two weeks ago, we were talking about where his monthly allowance had gone in May. He was reading off the transactions on the cash app I load for him.

“Lunch, lunch, lunch, oh, and I bought a ticket to the freshman dance.”

“Oh. When is it?”

“It’s the weekend of the soccer tournament. I’m going to miss it but I bought a ticket just in case so I don’t get shutout.”

Made sense to me. It was only $10. As we saw in the spring, sometimes your soccer plans… well, they don’t go the way you had hoped.

Then, last week, my son felt a little tenderness in his previously injured leg. It was likely fine but he decided to take a rest day rather than push it. He could likely play this weekend but three games in two days would be a lot.

Finally, a few days ago, we were driving in the car together when my son started reading off the list of artists playing at the big music festival this weekend - the one he was originally supposed to attend with his friends. It’s one of those big affairs with multiple stages and acts playing at the same time. Half of the fun is picking who you are going to see from among all of the choices.

After he finished reading off the list, I replied “Wow, fun lineup…”.

“Yeah, it is. So, we’re going to go see Kendrick Lamar and…”

“Going to see? I thought you sold your ticket?”

“It fell through. I could have probably sold it some other way but… there will be other soccer tournaments… and how many more chances will I get to go to a music festival with my friends?”

He and his friends are tight. They’re a good group of boys. They’re close.

“Well, I support that line of thinking...” I said.

“Plus, now I can go to the freshman dance. Pretty much all of my friends are going…”

“Sounds like you’re making a good decision.”

In truth, there are a whole bunch of reasons behind why he pulled out of the tournament.

Here’s the thing though… the one and only reason he was able to weigh them all was because he saw them rather than seeing only one: making the JV team in the fall.

My son opted to miss the soccer tournament this weekend. Two months ago, he would have fought me to the death if I had suggested it.

Instead, he went to the freshman dance on Friday. Afterwards, he went to an afterparty in a friend’s backyard.

Yesterday, a friend with a swimming pool threw a pool party. My son and his friends all went.

Today, he’s off at the music festival.

The kid has had an amazing weekend. Truth be told, I did too…

…because his weekend was a sign of the work. The effort I put in. The things I try to model and teach and coach. This labor of love which just feels like love.

At the end of the day, we’re all just teaching our kids to ride a bike over and over and over.

It’s all just one big act of slowly letting our hand off the back of their seat as they ride away on their own.

When you see your kid pedaling away happy… confident… balanced… and able to get back up when they fall… man, that’s a joyful little triumph.

Tomorrow, I’ll pick my son up at school. On the way home, we’ll talk about the festival and who he saw. He’ll play some clips for me and show me some pictures. I’ll act like I’m made happy by his happiness because I am.

This being a father thing… it is just the greatest joy of my life. I love it all. The easy and the hard. The challenges and the triumphs. I love it all.

It has been a good weekend.