CSotD: Goodness gracious great balls a-flyin’
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As I've mentioned before, Cul de Sac is bringing back memories of my life as a rec league soccer coach.
Memories, flashbacks, whatever you want to call them.
You start the season driving around searching for the practice field, yes. That's training for when you have to drive around finding the away games. Which, in turn, is practice for when your kid makes the junior varsity team. The varsity field is at the school. The JV field is god knows where, and you don't. For one of the schools in our league, it was five miles away on the other side of town, down a dirt road and through some trees. It was like playing against a team from the Witness Protection Program.
As for the rain of soccer balls, Richard Thompson is taking a bit of artistic license here. I'd have traded my soul for two or three kids Petey's age who could arc a ball high enough to bounce off the roof of a minivan. Most of them were still working on not stepping on the ball and ending up on their backs. I used to have them practice on a baseball field. They'd line up at the pitcher's rubber and take turns kicking the ball as I rolled it out from home plate. Anyone who could put it over the screen was a fullback.
But the only time any of them produced that kind of loft in a game was on penalty kicks. *sigh*
You do have to be careful where you park at a soccer game, but only after the kids are older. I had an assistant who took a part-time job one summer as a go-fer at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center for their outdoor concert series. Her job was mostly to hang out with the bands and fetch whatever they discovered they needed — for instance, the Dave Matthews Band found it was missing an amplifier cord, so she had to run to a guitar shop and find one with the right plug ends.
By the end of the summer, her minivan had a slight dent on one of the sliding doors that you wouldn't see if she didn't point it out, but she did point it out because, while she was too cool to ask for autographs, that dent was made with a soccer ball by a very apologetic Rod Stewart (who qualifies as an "older kid" on all sorts of levels).
Baseball parents are, of course, at much greater risk of automobile damage, and it goes without saying that your car is a lot safer parked beyond the outfield fences than along the baselines or behind home plate.
But the best parked-car damage I ever saw was at a horseshow in Great Barrington, Mass., back when I was about Petey's age and was at summer camp. They had a demonstration of cutting horses, and they released a herd of eight or 10 calves so the horse and rider could cut one out of the herd.
This is pretty impressive, exciting stuff to begin with, but it got even more impressive and exciting for my young male cohort when one of the calves, cornered by a very fast little pony, said to hell with it and bailed out over the fence, right onto the hood of a shiny Cadillac parked at ringside.
Now, there's a souvenir you don't have to point out!
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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