12 Balls for the New Year
A meta post about playing, thinking, and learning
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on. Once a week, usually on a Monday, I’ll have something new.
I’m in the middle of re-watching “Ted Lasso” for the third (!) time, so it seems appropriate to mark the start of the new year with a brief soccer post. As I learned a few years ago when I wrote a short essay about the history of the soccer ball (“The Football as Intellectual Property Object,” published in the wonderful “History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects” (Cambridge UP, Op Den Kamp and Hunter eds.), the beautiful game really is a marvelous metaphor for all sorts of things.
Which things? I'll leave it to readers of this Substack to figure out what I’m talking about. What’s the “meta” for?
As my own playing days were winding down, like a lot of parents of young children I coached young players. I even went to camp one weekend and “earned” the lowest level coaching certification then offered by the US Soccer Federation.
The teams that I coached were never particularly good, and the parents of my kids were sometimes a bit puzzled. I did my share of talking and teaching and even occasional yelling during practice, but - this is the part that puzzled Moms and Dads - I rarely raised my voice from the sideline during games, and never in anything other than an encouraging tone.
But I know for certain that the kids had fun, in their imaginations as well as with their feet, because both they and their parents told me so. That meant that the players kept playing. A large number of the boys went on to successful high school careers. I know of at least three boys from one of my teams that played varsity D3 college soccer and at least one girl who played varsity D1 college soccer (plus one who switched sports and later played varsity D3 field hockey).
My town’s soccer club, which supported both “recreation” teams (where I was coaching) and “travel” teams (but not “cup” teams - the next competitive level up), invited me to become the club’s head of coaching. I said “no”; my own children weren’t passionate enough about sports to justify the time investment on my part.
Here is a game that I used to play with the kids in practice. It seemed to work best with players ages 8 to 10 or so. I don’t recall where I learned it. I always called it “12 Balls.”
With four traffic cones, frame a square about eight yards or meters on each side. In the middle of the square, place 12 balls. Collect 12 players and divide them into four teams of three players each. Station one team of three players at each cone, just outside the perimeter of the square.
With the teams and the balls in position, explain the the game to the players in the following simple terms:
The object of the game is to collect four balls next to your team’s cone. Balls can be picked up and carried by hand, but each player can carry only one ball at a time.
(At this point, I made it clear that there were no other rules, that players were not permitted to ask questions about the game, and that I would stand well clear of the square and not be involved in any ongoing respect.)
Get ready. Get set. (Whistle blows.)
Go.
Happy New Year.