The Picturesque Evening & The Soccer Ball
The other night I went for a run through an upscale town out in the country. I found a bike path that meandered through parks and neighborhoods, connected by wooded sections along the river. It was pretty.
The town felt like a suburb that belongs much closer to a major city. The kind of place you’d find the edge of one town melting into the next. But when I reached the neighborhood at the north end of town, there were cornfields beyond instead of perfect rows of more houses.
It was Saturday evening, and there were a few other people running. There were frisbee golfers and families out for bike rides. People walking their dogs and people enjoying the many parks. It was one of those pleasant, picturesque summer nights.
Running back to my car at the south end of the trail, I noticed a family playing together in one of the parks. A mom, a dad, and their probably eight-year-old son on a soccer field. The dad was playing goalie while the mom helped position the ball for their son to shoot at the net. They were having fun, and I was running a long enough straightaway to watch the boy take his shot.
He missed his shot, the ball rolling wide to the left far past the goal. His parents cheered him on anyway, especially his mom. Then, I watched his dad run to retrieve the ball while the boy stood there waiting. I cocked my head while running, curious about this dynamic. The boy certainly seemed old enough to collect his own missed shots.
I was already passed them before the boy took another shot, so I don’t know if they took turns chasing down stray soccer balls. I was simply an observer of a moment in other intertwined lives that I know absolutely nothing about. For all I know, it could have been the first time the boy had ever kicked a soccer ball.
That knowledge didn’t stop the urge I felt to run over to them and say excuse me, but your son looks old enough to chase his own missed shots. He’ll learn to shoot better if he has to run after the ball himself. I didn’t run over. Because it almost definitely wouldn’t land as the helpful advice I imagine it to be. And because it wasn’t my place to say anything at all.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are from the soccer field. I remember pulling on my yellow jersey and chasing the ball around with all the other four and five year olds. My jerseys changed colors as time passed by. Pink, purple, green, and teal t-shirts piled up. Then blue, white, and occasionally maroon silky jerseys.
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t responsible for chasing down the ball when I missed my marks. Even at age five, I knew that if I was old enough to kick the ball, I was old enough to collect it. I think I learned that at my first ever soccer practice. And I chased my own balls in every practice and every game for the next twelve years that I played.
It was a simple lesson. And I learned a whole lot more from it than the better your aim, the less time you spend running after stray shots. I learned how to clean up after myself, off the soccer field too. I learned about taking responsibility and ownership of my actions. Soccer taught me how to fail, then dust myself off and keep trying.
Sports aren’t about perfection. Sports teach us how to struggle through learning something new. We learn how to fail, and then to fail a little less as we get incrementally better. Then, when we succeed at one thing in our sport, we keep pushing. We get comfortable taking on the difficulty of a new level we probably won’t be good at right away.
Because in sports we learn to see how far we’ve already come. Because we’re better when we learn to chase down our own missed shots.
