Love Thirty
Using Soccer Tennis and Other Games To Weather the COVID-19 Downtime and Stay Sharp
Things came at us really fast in early March, and then in an instant, came to a grinding halt. My daughter, an aspiring competitive alpine ski racer, and equally aspiring competitive soccer player had the remainder of her 2019/2020 competitive ski racing season cut short by the COVID-19 crisis, and that was after working hard to recover from a mid-season injury. She was gutted when she found out all USSA sanctioned events were cancelled for the year. Of course, what swiftly followed was the closure of every North American ski resort, so there would be no way to keep training. The only salve that seemed to heal the wounds of having to give up on the end of season goals for one sport was the notion of returning to her other sport, with her club soccer team. That antidote for heartache showed early promise, but was quickly stripped away by statewide decisions by UYSA and local clubs, and shortly followed by local county and state stay-at-home orders. And that’s where we find ourselves right now. Bigger hardships and tragedy are happening all around us, both economic and health related. It would be easy to say we have bigger problems, and youth sports doesn’t matter, but I think it is going to matter more than ever to the physical and mental health of our kids, when we start climbing out of the social and economic aftermath of COVID-19.
A focus of mine, besides pondering the thoughts of long term effects on our current youth sports model (See the Aspen Institute Webinar, Coronavirus and Youth Sports: What The Future Holds) has been coming up with ideas to help my daughter overcome her disappointment and remain optimistic and focused on what comes after this hard-to-navigate downtime. The role of the Parent Coach has never been more important. But it is also riddled with pitfalls and landmines.
For many kids, team sports are the sacred domain of peer-to-peer relationships, the secret treehouse where parents are not allowed. In the case of soccer, the hour and a half of team practice a couple times a week, is their time, not parent or family time, and that turf has been ripped away from them. The socializing and bonding that comes from playing team sports has been taken away.
Somewhat by accident, my daughter and I have found some things that are working to help her stay motivated, keeping a foot on the ball, as coaches say, and fostering some hope and vision that when she does get back on the field, things are going to be more than just ok. I have explained to my daughter the great leveling effect this will have on skills: a chance to catch up, move ahead, but never stay the same. Sometimes intrinsic motivation is hard to come by. A gentle nudge reminder of the benefits of staying committed can go a long way, and it can also turn sour. These are hard life lessons that are only learned through living through them, and we are currently in the moment.
We call it Soccer Tennis. It’s soccer because we use our feet. It’s tennis because we use a net in the middle. Other than that, the “rules” change depending on our moods, the weather, whoever is watching.
Sticking to a schedule has been habit-forming for us, it’s 5pm until dinner, and sometimes dinner gets pushed, if we are locked in a heated match! But we start at 5pm. Every day since the lockdown began. It may have been harder before social distancing efforts to stay disciplined and stick to this sort of pre-dinner bell timeframe, but as we all seem to have a little more time on our hands, and this has worked well for us. Our neighbors who are out on walks, maintaining appropriate social distance, look on as we play, often intrigued in the game itself. What’s the score? Who is winning? Hey, your daughter is kicking your ass! No holiday cookies will be going to that neighbor, I am thinking. Damn, lost my concentration, and there goes another point.
We have found a way to gamify these sessions, and it is paying off. My daughter likes to win, and I discovered what my true role is as a Parent Coach: to be a competent and composed loser. Even as my skills sharpen and my tactics get dirtier to try to eke out a point or two and steal a game before losing a set, her’s are incrementally adjusting, and more and more I find myself smiling after losing the point after a rally or volley that lasted 10 to fifteen minutes.
We did the math. The way we play, we see 35 to 40 touches for each player on the typical point. The average game is about 300 touches each, the average set is about 1,500 touches. That’s what each player gets, all in a dynamic reps environment. Way more valuable than juggling in place or grinding out solitary wall passes.
We have created our own version of a game that is both freestyle and inventive, but within some structural constraints that keep the brain engaged with what the feet are doing. For example, my daughter and I have often watched high level tennis matches, to witness glimpses of greatness from players like Serena Willians and Roger Federer, but it seemed like every time we watched an iconic match, my daughter would ask again about the scoring mechanisms and rules of tennis. Never again. She knows that Love is zero, Deuce is a tie and you have to win by two, and she knows that more often or not, when it is her Advantage, Dad starts to get a little antsy, prone to making easy mistakes. Then she goes in for the kill shot. We have some of our own house rules, and sometimes we have to do a Wayne’s World scene: “Car….Game On.” But our neighbors are so used to it, they will gladly wait until we finish a point.
If you have a driveway, or some quiet street in front of your house, or a couple empty spaces of a lined parking lot, you don’t need much to play this game. We use sidewalk chalk and a tape measure to draw out the court lines, and a Street Soccer Ball that we bought a few years ago from Amazon.
As far as our net, we use a SKILZ multipurpose bounce back like this one: SKILZ Quickster.
SKILZ and other brands make dedicated soccer volley nets, but I’m guessing you could find something in your garage to do in a pinch. Boxes, whatever. The point is, whatever you have, find some way to make a game out of it, keep it fun even if fun means keeping score, and if you are a Parent Coach reading this, be prepared to be a good sport when your kid starts delivering regular and consistent beat downs. It is truly a great thing!
