Losing at Sports, One Generation at a Time

A legacy of mediocrity.

I wrote this a couple years back, but it is not online now. So I thought I would share it for subscribers. Enjoy!
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“Your team,” my friend Diego told me, giving his head a sad little shake. “They’re just not any good.”

Diego wasn’t being cruel. He was simply stating an unfortunate truth. My daughter’s third grade soccer team was pitiful. The neighborhood league was supposed to try to balance teams, but something had gone horribly awry in our case. My daughter was one of the better players, in that she would mostly stay in position and if you rolled a ball right at her, she could kick it generally forward. Most of her teammates wandered around in an abstracted daze, fitfully dashing toward the ball and then running away if it headed toward them. Diego’s son dribbled around them like they were particularly ineffectual shrubs and scored at will. We, on the other hand, never scored a single goal all season.

It didn’t help that the coach of this sad sack team was equally useless. That coach would be me.