Selling Our Souls to Soccer?

Josiah came home to us at nine months old and found the ping pong balls on the second day. They were the perfect size for his tiny fists and he crawled around the house with one in each hand, clicking on the tile floors. 

His first word was daddy and his second word was ball and I’m not bitter about that at all of course.

All his favorite toys centered around soccer. On Sundays after church, we ate at P-Square and while we waited for our rice and beans and mishkaki (P-Square had the best mishkaki), he and his sisters would hunt around the plastic tables for bottle caps. Soon he had enough so that each kind was a soccer team – like, Fanta was Manchester United and Sprite was Liverpool. Gil made him a soccer field out of green pressboard and Josiah spent hours playing bottlecap soccer, arranging his “players” in perfect formation. 

Every year for his birthday, the only gift he wanted was the new version of the FIFA video game. So every fall, we figured out a way for somebody to bring us FIFA 2014 or 2015 or 2016 out to Tanzania. His parties were soccer themed for six years in a row. 

He mastered a diving header at three and a bicycle kick at four. He played soccer before school, at recess, and after school and usually came home with his lunch uneaten because he played then too. When I nagged him about eating lunch, he asked me to make him something he could shove down his throat in 30 seconds. 

In Tanzania, I loved that Josiah loved soccer and I loved watching him play. He joined the HOPAC team and had a couple of practices and a game each week. Maybe twice a year, he had a tournament on a Saturday. Often, Gil was his coach. On Sunday evenings, families would informally gather at HOPAC and play together – all ages. Soccer almost always happened at HOPAC so it flowed easily into our lives. 

Two years ago, we moved to America, and I started hating soccer. Josiah was quickly recruited for an AYSO club team, and we said yes because during the pandemic, we were eager to help him make connections. And thus, the full force of what it means to have a kid play club soccer crashed down on me, with evening practices and games almost every weekend – year-round.

I threw several little hissy fits last year. I seethed against the hurried family dinners and the lack of free time on weekends. I mourned our busyness and inability to spend more time in ministry. But then I looked around and other families didn’t seem fazed by this. Driving an hour to a tournament every Saturday was apparently normal life for American parents. I experienced serious culture shock. 

Gil and I have never had aspirations for our kids to go far in sports. We don’t have lofty goals for college; we drive past the community college five minutes from our house and cheerfully announce, “Hey kids, wave hello to your future college!” I rail against this American culture that tells me I must push my children to reach their potential in every area, that success in school and sports or arts is the ultimate goal of parenting. 

Josiah always said he wanted to be a professional soccer player when he grew up. And I would always smile condescendingly and say, “That’s a nice dream, Buddy, but it’s not going to happen. Choose something else.” This was usually followed by, “Get off your backside and do your homework.”

Unfortunately for me, this summer the coach of an elite team invited Josiah to be a starter on his team. He told us that Josiah could likely play for a Division I college. And possibly become a professional player.

(Oops. Someday if Disney makes a story about Josiah’s life, his mom will take the role of The Dream Smasher. That’s okay. Every good sports movie needs one.)

Gil and I weighed deeply this opportunity for Josiah, discussing the advantages but also the cost to our family. Then we did something very unAmerican and said no to the elite team. Josiah continues to play for AYSO club, and he’ll play as a freshman on his varsity high school team. But he won’t be traveling all over California on the elite team.

To make things more complicated, Johnny (who is 10) is rapidly following in his brother’s soccer footsteps. He played for AYSO Extra last year and was also recruited this year for a highest-level team. Yet this school year, we’ve decided to hold Johnny back from club soccer altogether – at least for a while. And we asked Grace to scale back from two school sports to one. 

We’re reducing opportunity instead of adding to it. 

When are sports healthy and positive in a family’s life, and when do they become idolatry? The problem I’ve discovered in America is that there is no happy medium; finding balance in sports is almost impossible. Even holding our kids back from all they could do, I still brace myself for another crazy school year. My part-time job is my kids’ chauffeur. I am over the culture shock of American sports, but that doesn’t mean I like it. 

Are these the right choices for our kids? This question haunts me. I actually don’t honestly want to be the Dream Smasher. If God gave me this son who seems to have been born for soccer, how do I pave the way for him to develop his talent while balancing character formation, school, church, and our other three kids? Am I preventing him from reaching his potential, or is this quest for balance encouraging his health? Would I even want my son to live the life of a professional athlete? I wrestle with this. Yet there are no clear answers. 

You remember those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books? I was a total cheater. After realizing that some paths led to falling off a cliff or being eaten by wolves, I would flip around the book until I had figured out every possible outcome, and then I followed the one with the best ending.

How I wish I could do that with my kids’ lives. But instead, I fumble along, flipping pages and changing my mind, hemming and hawing and then diving into what seems like the wisest course. Good thing I can trust the One who’s actually writing the story.