I sat inside a secured warehouse office with three other grown men working midnights, protecting influenza vaccine that nobody ever intended to vandalize or steal.
A political appointee deemed that year’s preventative flu pharmaceuticals a national asset that needed security. We watched movies most of the night. Meanwhile, an existing contracted, uniformed security force patrolled the warehouse that we were deployed to protect. Nonsensical, but not unusual. Newly appointed politicians love to play with their new toys and boys, regardless the cost to taxpayers.
Tired of staring at the television, I walked outside the office and meandered through the aisles of palletized warehouse medical goods. My wife called as I gazed up and down the racks of seemingly immeasurable materials. I listened as she caught me up with the family world 1700 miles away. Then she snuck in a shocking bit of news. She signed me up to coach my son’s soccer team. My previous exposure to soccer lasted about seven minutes in an elementary P.E. class in the late 1970’s.
I gently explained I possessed no qualifications to coach any level of soccer, including youth league. She aptly replied that the city parks and recreations department required no prerequisites other than a pulse and an absence of a violent criminal history. Solely based on these two cornerstone requirements, I fit the bill. However my lack of coaching experience and scarcity of soccer knowledge seemed like a recipe for athletic disaster.
“They’re 5. What do you need to know?,” she replied to my concerns.
I’d seen 4V4 soccer games. No goalies, a small open net, and 8 kids chasing a ball up and down the field. I called it “herd ball”. The team with the fastest runners usually won the games, even though parks and recreations recorded no scores for these matches. It was really just a cardiovascular event for pre-schoolers and kindergartners and something to discretely wager between other parents. If only we had Jamie Foxx and BetMGM back then.
The 4V4 soccer league was coed. Our team consisted of 5 girls and 4 boys. I noticed other teams did not adhere to quite the same even dispersal between the genders. One team consisted of 8 boys and 1 girl. I suppose that’s technically coed. Maybe some of the boys were “transitioning”. Other than us, nobody’s team comprised more girls than boys. Little did I know that this would prove to be a significant advantage.
With our freshly assigned Little Tykes black soccer t-shirts (jerseys, if I may) we actively debated on a team moniker. I recall pony and pegasus names on the table, but the team majority voted for dragons. More specifically, the Black Dragons. Black to match the shirts and dragons because they’re fearsome and ferocious. More likely though, it was because there is a dragon in Shrek. A female dragon. No misogamy here.
In case nobody clued you in, girls and boys are different.
No, really, they are. This goes well beyond the obvious. Our team had competing alpha males with some serious wheels. These little dudes screamed up and down the field far faster than almost all of the competition. Normally, this is a good thing. However, I described them as alphas. As soon as they reached a dribbling player, the fight was on to gain control of the soccer ball. Once again this is normally a good thing, unless the dribbling player is also a teammate. Oops.
We routinely outscored the opponents even though our boys consistently fought with each other in front of an open net while the other team looked itty bitty in our rearview mirrors, nowhere near the goal. Quite often this resulted in a failed opportunity to score. I started thinking they purposively did this just to keep the games closer.
The girls on our team possessed equal amounts of athleticism and some of them had solid speed as well. However, teamwork set them apart from the boys. They did not sprint downfield and overtake teammates in an attempt to steal the ball. They shared the ball by using the novel sports concept of passing. The girls ran to open space, making themselves available to receive a pass. And fascinatingly, their female teammates kicked the ball over to them. And even more amazing, this tactic worked!
Befuddled by the boy’s ineptitude at passing, I experimented.
In the second half of a game, I sent in an all-girl lineup. They faced an all-boy opponent lineup. This opponent was second only to our team. Our Black Dragon all-girl squad marched up and down the field and scored at will against the all-boy squad. I quickly explained to our boys on the sidelines why the girls were destroying the other team. Luckily, a lightbulb came on for our little boy ball hogs.
Instead of beating each other up and fighting for possession of the sacred soccer ball, they learned to pass to each other, which resulted in more goals. The phenomena of teamwork finally came together for our young lads. Interestingly, this concept seemed more innate with the girls. I never needed to coach them on how to share and play together as a team. Alpha females battling it out on the youth soccer field wasn’t really ever a thing for us.
However, the girls never questioned anything I said either.
This may sound like a Godsend, but it’s still healthy to ask questions when you don’t understand. I learned years later the term “mark up” for guarding your opponent. I simply told the team to cover a player on the other team. In the last game of the season, one of the girl’s asked what “cover” meant. I’d said it all season, but never explained it because I thought it a universal concept.
I quickly explained the technique before the ball was thrown in from the sidelines. I wondered how many other players had no idea what I meant, but never asked for clarification. Nice job, coach. This same girl later told me that I had hair in my ear. I thanked her for the observation and made a mental note to work on personal grooming. Girls like sharing, even when you’re not prepared for their opinions.
My wife suggested that if only women ruled the world, there’d be no wars. Perhaps she’s correct. I wonder if primitive man found teamwork difficult when hunting Wooly Mammoths. Perhaps they experienced a primordial epiphany after watching Grog get trampled and gored by an enormous, tusked creature. Meanwhile the cavewomen created prehistoric scrapbook projects on stone walls and stayed warm by the fire.
I have no idea if any of that is historically accurate.
I do know that if hunting Wooly Mammoths, I’d want to be on an organized, cohesive team. And apparently, I’d likely want about a 50-50 male to female ratio if youth league soccer is any kind of a barometer for success. This is probably why years ago I sat inside a warehouse office with 3 other men while another group of men sat 100 feet from us in another warehouse office, all performing the exact same pharmaceutical protection assignment. By the way, the political appointee who created this mission was a man. My wife and our five year-old youth league soccer team would never had done something so dumb, no matter how much mansplaining they heard.