Soccer

My athletic gifts used to be more obvious. Cue the sex jokes. I used to play team sports, practicing four out of seven days, playing two games in between. The regularity of practicing, especially soccer, built me into a lean, mean, fighting machine. The sprints, the plyometrics, before I knew they were plyometrics, the small-sided games, the scrimmages, all got me to my fittest self. Not that I was a fitness freak, no, that wasn’t me. I was a player. I just loved to play. And I wasn’t a killer or a masochist in the traditional sense of an athlete, I was slightly more aloof and a little lazy. I didn’t appreciate that all of those building blocks built the quad-defined, brick wall that was me. My joy came in the form of my senses. The seeing, the hearing, the smelling, and the feeling of the ball leaving my foot, the lift of my toe, the softness of the touch, the generation of force in the arch of my lower back, the drive in my butt, the flexibility in my quads, and the knowledge of all planes of my foot. If there was one thing I was truly dedicated to as a teenager it was juggling a soccer ball, for hours on end, those cheapy little touches that kept a session going, where the dorsiflexion of my foot kept a streak alive. The goal was so clear and attainable. I would just go and go and go, first 50, then 100, 150, suddenly to 500 touches, then maybe 750 at some point. I can’t remember, but it may have been my first time in the zone when all of my focus was in one place for a sustained period of time. Jen Bryan recognized this once when I was on a roll, and she started asking me questions as my muscle memory went to work. She asked me what my favorite color was, and I said “green”. I kept going when others lost patience. Kept going until I got to the thighs exclusively and would stack up high numbers like in a video game. And that one moment when you were close to losing it, and you lunged and leapt and saved the day from disappointment. If there was one skill I would tell soccer players to master it would be this. I learned more about controlling a soccer ball in all ways through juggling on the daily. You didn’t need anyone, it was just you and a ball and a little determination and patience. I learned those desperation touches, the heel kick from behind that kept the ball alive, the lunge touch, and then the recovery, back to stasis, back to the comfort and predictability. So when I watch these world cup guys play and make deft touches, make awkward touches, hit it too hard, put some English on it, I know what that feels like. I know the joy in bending a ball, curling it towards goal. I know the joy in setting your teammate up with a chip to the head for a goal. I know the satisfaction of clearing a ball when nothing seems to be going right, and there is chaos. And I know the freedom of laying out as long as you can to poke a ball out of the net. I know these things, and I miss them. But watching makes me replay my greatest hits and reminds me of a ball hit so hard that it doesn’t spin and wobbles making it hard to track. It reminds me of being afraid of doing a crossing drill for headers on goal. It reminds me of the freedom of play.