My Little Football Star

I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it, especially seeing as how I haven't mentioned much of anything the last few months, but Monkey has been playing football. He's on a 65 lb, 5 - 6 year old team that is affiliated with a local recreation association. I know, I know - 5 years old and playing football?! DH and I swore we'd never do it, and to be honest, DH was seriously against it. But Monkey's best friend was playing, the best friend's dad was an assistant coach, and I had no idea this association or the parents involved took this so seriously. I thought it would be this fun little activity where the boys would learn some fundamentals, some discipline, some sportsmanship. I had rose-colored visions of an experience akin to my days in YMCA softball - my friend LP and I hanging out in right field, playing in the dirt, while our moms half-heartedly yelled at us to look alive out there. Fresh air, exercise, friendship. Good times. Good times.

The times, they have a-changed. My monkey was not going to have the same experience I had with youth sports. These people meant business. When I took him to sign up, another parent happily filled me in on the reputation of this league. It was so much better than the other namby-pamby league in the area that only cared about having fun. These boys play to win. By the time they get to high school, they know more than any other players from any other leagues. High school coaches love to get kids from this league because they are so far ahead in talent, training, and knowledge. These boys play to set the stage for their future NFL careers. Throughout the season several parents probably had to go on medication for the high blood pressure they got pacing up and down the sidelines, yelling at the refs, the coaches, the players, even the watergirls. These boys are FIVE AND SIX YEARS OLD!!!

Many times, DH and I thought we were alone in realizing that the kids are not going to the pros next year, so there was really no need to train them so hard - three nights a week for two, sometimes almost two and a half hours at a time; no sense in talking to them like they were miniature Peyton Mannings, Terry Bradshaws, and Mean Joe Greens (Who's impressed that I knew actual names of actual athletes, albeit a couple of extremely retired ones? Show of hands? Just me? Okay, moving on.) - giving them complicated terms and explanations that simultaneously went zooming over their heads AND in one ear and out the other in one spectacular move; no good reason to get so upset when things didn't go exactly as planned - one poor watergirl actually cried because she was so confused by all the parents screaming directions at her. (Wow! I do love my run-on sentences, don't I?)

But as the season went on, we did find a few other like-minded parents who didn't take it so seriously. And I have to admit, it was adorable seeing these little guys in their uniforms - big, huge shoulder pads that swallowed them whole; pants that came all the way to their ankles with knee pads covering their shins; big bobble-head helmets that they could barely see out of. And it was a lot of fun to watch the kids play. They started off as a rag-tag group of kids who couldn't run in a straight line. They ended up as football players. While Monkey still can't run in a straight line, he did have a few good plays. He even got a shout-out from one of the coaches after a game for playing really well. Some of the kids have true talent, too. One little guy was not only amazingly fast and scored the majority of all the touchdowns, but he was intuitive and skilled when it came to not getting tackled. He could out-maneuver almost any kid who got in his way. And perhaps the best moment of all, at Homecoming, Monkey was named King! There were scraps of paper, a hat, and lots of luck involved, but it was still really exciting for him. I was so proud, I even got a little tear watching him get his trophy and stand with the cheerleaders while people took pictures of them. Bottom-line is, the kids had fun, and we did, too. All in all, the boys only lost three or four games. They won a couple by forfeit. But they won the rest by hard work, good defense, and that fast phenom whose face I've still never seen - only the back of his jersey as he zoomed down the field.

But still, we were kind of looking forward to it being over. It had been a long season. Long practices, even on Labor Day (!), that routinely went beyond the supposed quitting time. Early Saturday mornings traveling to fields thirty to forty-five minutes away (had to be there by eight for weigh-in). It would be nice to sleep in on Saturdays again, and to not rush home after work, skipping dinner and barely having time to change clothes, in order to get him to practice on time. This Saturday would decide if we would be snoring away in one week, or if the boys would be rocking out to "We Are the Champions" at the Superbowl instead. They had a playoff game this weekend that would decide their fate. This was an "important" game. They were playing the only team that had beaten them twice during the regular season. Each time they lost to this team, it came down to the final minutes, so we knew this would be a tough game. While I knew it would be cool for the kids to go to the Superbowl, and it would be really cool for Monkey, who, in all likelihood, will never don pads and helmet again in his lifetime, a part of me was not looking forward to one more week of freezing my tail off at practice until the late hour of almost 8:30 PM. (8:30 is late? Man, I'm old!) I wasn't sure what I wanted to have happen.

What did happen? Well, not that anyone is listening, so there's really no need to try and be suspenseful (no need to really blog at all, for that matter, but that's for another, more existential-themed post), but it's late, I'm exhausted, and I have to get up in a few hours. Until later, Go Steelers!