Soccer Anyone?

Tonight, soccer season begins. I am coaching a 7-8 team on which "the Boy" plays. Teaching young children soccer is something similiar to trying to herd a bunch of cats. I love doing it though. The crap that comes out of their mouths and better yet their parent's mouths is just priceless. You can bet this won't be the last soccer based post.

Here's a pretty good soccer story from last year. Last season, I coached a 5-6 coed team. On that team, I had a child named J. J was one of those beautiful children that could be a model, great skin tone, long braided hair. J also had one of those androgynous names that could either be a boy or a girl's name. Well you can probably see where this one is going. For the first 3 weeks of a six week season, I thought that J was a girl. J definitely looked like a girl. Afterall, the kid had hair braids complete with hair colorful hair elastics. And I'm not talking about cool corn row hair braids. I am talking about two in the back pollyanna hair braids. Not once did anyone tell me otherwise including J's parents and even J, who was 6 years old and could obviously speak. All the other kids thought he was a girl; my assistant coach thought he was a girl. Finally, at picture day, middle of the season, when I was lining the kids up my mistake apparently became obvious to one of the other kid's mother's. She takes me off to the side and tell me that J is a boy and that it took her 6 months the previous year to figure it out. I was floored. At first, I even thought she was just messing with me. Well it took me nearly the whole three week to get the calling him a girl thing out of my system. To this day, "the Boy" is still confused.

Parents, while I understand you want your children to be individuals. Please be very careful when cross gender dressing them without their consent. It's an ass kicking waiting to happen.