Yesterday was the 7-Year-Old's second-to-last soccer game of the season. Way back in August when they were having their second practice and the uniforms (well, t-shirts and socks) were being distributed, I saw that they were being sponsored by an orthodontist: this inspired little confidence, somehow. Around here we still have a manufacturing-based economy (or what's left of one) and it's more usual for teams to have sponsors with names that refer either to heavy construction companies or the heroes of ridiculous action movies, it's hard to tell which -- names like "Slag Bituminous," I mean. Anyway.
For whatever reason, maybe a bad draft, the 7-Year-Old's team on average tends to be shorter than the other teams. And they have the added challenge of being on the whole nice, funny kids. This puts them at a real disadvantage in sports. It only occurred to me a few weeks ago that the kind of kid who listens to teachers and other adults about things like "don't forget to share, don't push, stop running" isn't necessarily going to do well on the soccer field, where at this age it's the boys and girls who are the most aggressive who tend to do better. Our 7-Year-Old is of course an evil genius, but his fiendishness is not typically expressed in an overtly brutish manner.
All of which is to say that the 7-Year-Old's team tends to routinely get clobbered. There's no official score, but still, it's obvious: they get clobbered. What's nice though is that the kids themselves don't actually seem to care. The 7-Year-Old is mostly just excited that there's a tent set up near the soccer fields where he can get hot chocolate, something that appeals to him greatly on a chilly morning.
He's been playing goalie, too, which he enjoys, and it was good to see him actually learn things over the course of the season. Like that a goalie can use his hands. He knew this in a theoretical sense when he first tried playing goalie in a game, but still kept trying to block everything by taking a wild kick at the ball, which didn't work. So we went home and we practiced; I kicked the ball at him and he practiced knocking it down and picking it up and throwing it. And the next time he was goalie, he made some cool saves.
The other thing he learned that I'd thought was in fact kind of silly was kicking the ball backwards. He wanted to learn how to kick backwards, and so he practiced. And damn, in the game yesterday, didn't he actually do this. He got the ball, two players on the other team converged on him like second grade monsters, and he faked them out totally by kicking the ball backwards with a perfectly placed & executed no-look backwards pass to the best player on his team.
Of course, the 7-Year-Old not only totally faked out the other team, but his own; the best player on his team, for all his skill, had never before received a perfectly placed & executed backwards pass. He's only 7, for chrissakes. Surprised the crap out of him. So the ball just bounced off his foot, rebounded, and then the other team got the ball back and scored.
But it was a genuinely cool moment nonetheless -- the 7-Year-Old just looked really classy doing it, and the whole parental sideline ooohed and laughed and clapped, which made me feel all warm and buttery.
And at the end of the game the 7-Year-Old's team got Nutter Butters as their Snack, and the whole way home the 7-year-Old talked nonstop about the differences and similarities between Nutter Butter cookies and Ritz Bits Peanut Butter crackers. It was a learned and minute disquisition.