Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: So long, Cleats

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Mike Peterson Published: October 31, 2010 1 minute 0 comments

This is the last Cleats strip. Bill Hinds has pulled the plug, as of today.

I'm sorry to see the strip go, both as someone who coached his own kids in youth soccer, and as someone who has seen his own boys grow up to be coaches.

How'd I get into it? Oh, the usual way …

I don't know that my kids learned a whole lot from my coaching, but they did pick the one position that I guess I could help them with. If only I'd been able to help them by doing a better job with the other positions … still, it was good practice for my older son, who, just before his sophomore year, moved to a school that was just starting a boys varsity soccer program. He was one of two players on the team who had ever played the sport, and he sure got a lot of chances to show off his skills.

My strength as a coach tended to be more in the area of parent-relations, though I found it hard to strike that necessary balance between begging them to show up for the games and begging them to behave on the sidelines when they did.

Good thing the kids seemed pretty immune to me, my assistant coaches and their parents, too. Kids grow and develop despite our efforts, not because of them.

And, watching my grandkids as they start out, that hasn't changed in the intervening 30 years …

I managed to get Cleats in the sports section of a small local paper where I worked, which seemed a natural fit, since more than half the coverage was of local high school teams, all of whom had started in rec leagues, all of whose parents had trekked around with the orange slices and folding chairs.

But there I saw the pushback that Bill reported, too — the Old Guard at the papers who just couldn't reconcile themselves with soccer, and who feel obligated every four years to cover the World Cup by pointing out that nobody likes soccer, there isn't enough scoring and it's not a real sport. That's compounded at a small daily by the fact that, despite the intense interest in youth sports on the part of their readers, most of the sportswriters are hoping for the day when they'll get to go to their own version of the Major Leagues and cover "real athletes" playing "real sports."

I'm really going to miss this strip, and, if you want to see my favorite Cleats strips of all time, plus read a profile of Bill Hinds, take a look at the CSOTD post I did this past April.

Better yet, get a copy of the compilation book he did a few years ago. It won't replace having the strip in your daily paper, but good, unappreciated strips deserve Second Chances.