My Summer of Soccer
For most of my life I have told myself I suck at team sports. But this year, I challenged that idea and found out that it's actually really fun?
My first memories of soccer are of my dad watching it very early in the morning and telling me to leave him alone. Then there is him trying and failing to teach me how to kick the ball around; the lessons always ending with his eyes narrowed, a disappointed glare and inaudible mutter under his breath in Polish about how hopelessly slow and clumsy I was. He would pretend to pray to the sky, God why did you give me this daughter. As a child I probably smirked or laughed or rolled my eyes, tried to play off his casual cruelties with the same disinterested expressions my mom made when they were directed at her.
The story of me not being good sports has always been with me.
When he had his warehouse next to Mccarren Park I would watch him play tennis or soccer, sometimes with whatever child the other polish-dad had brought along. Sometimes alone. Each time he would try again to teach me, and each time my half-hearted attempts of swinging the racket or setting up to score a goal would end in tears, silence and me stomping off to sulk in the corner while he laughed at me.
Compared to some of the other kids, I felt that at least my version of mean-Soviet-dad didn’t force me to become good, as many of the other dads did. There was some relief in being a lost-cause. Trying to get good looked really hard and miserable to me.
So the story that I was just bad at sports hardened into a facet of my identity, one that also protecting me from ever trying. During recess or gym class I would prefer to be chosen last or not at all for every activity. As a teenager I didn’t date jocks and barely graduated high school because of a missing PE credit. I was artsy, into music and people who brooded. Sports were for the smiling, well behaved normals.
I went to a small liberal arts school for college where my disinterest and avoidance flourished. There were no big sports programs. No school mascot or homecoming. Other than an occasional game of naked frisbee and a highly competitive game of Manhunt that took over the school for one week a year, sports may as well have not existed for most of my college career.
It wasn’t until I studied abroad - a semester in Spain, that something changed. I got my dad a FC Barcelona jersey outside of Camp Neu, which I didn’t care to enter, instead spending a full day at the Sagrada Familia. I didn’t know that they were in the Champions League final that year until I got caught in the victorious riots that broke out in the streets when they won, my platinum blonde hair drawing attention as I was propped up on some mans shoulders and the crowd shouted La Rubia! La Rubia! until police dispersed the crowds. My dad loved this story, and from that moment I had team to call my own. The year was 2006.
Back home, when I would spend the weekend with my dad and be woken up by Telemundo at 4am I watched with him and translated. He tried to explain the triangles and shapes on the screen that the players were forming but it was too abstract for me to follow.
That fall semester, I fell in love with a soccer player. We were an unlikely pair in many ways - and it was totally by chance that he even ended up there after losing his scholarship to play at a top tier school in Boston due to broken ankle. He went from playing on a high level for the past ten years of his life to coaching the scrappy co-ed team that played neighboring liberal arts schools - not exactly the pinnacle of his decade of effort.
When I introduced him to my dad, something I had never done before, I suspected that they might get along. But it was bittersweet to see what it looked when my dad wasn’t disappointed. How expressive and animated he became. How much he was eager to talk shit about Liverpool and have someone understand and talk back. My dad told us about his days playing soccer in a New York City World Cup with a team of Polish immigrants. He told us that my mom would watch him play, and that she was even worse than me. My boyfriend joked to my dad that maybe he could teach me, and with eyebrows raised he shook his head “Not a chance in hell brother.”
But time is a circle. Maybe a sphere. Maybe it’s a ball. In Polish the word for soccer is is Piłka Nozna but it’s most often just called piłka. If you play ball, then you play soccer.
After college I moved to Paris with the soccer player and we lived there for three years. When my dad got cancer, he moved back with me so we could be in New York. It was an opportunity for me to reconcile with my dad and then to say goodbye. After my dad died he held my grief and we left New York and moved to California to rebuild our lives again. A year later he became my husband and a year after that the father to our first son.
We have two now, and they are both extremely good at soccer. My husband coached our eldest son’s team for two years and no amount of therapy or art or healing prepared me for the ache that comes with watching the boys absolutely crush a sport that my dad would have so loved to play with them, talk about with them and watch with them. My husband knows it and we often lock eyes and smile, him recognizing and understanding my sadness in a way that makes it so much less heavy to carry.
It’s been almost exactly twenty years since I was in Spain, since I fell in love with my soccer player, since the very slow process of changing my relationship with sports began. Earlier this year my husband invested in a new space that would blend soccer, retail and a cafe into one with a focus on community. Honestly, at first I thought it sounded like my own personal hell - loud, bro-ey, and the old story kicked up in full force. I’m not good at sports/ I don’t belong here. But after spending the last few years taking my kids to soccer practice, games and tournaments and honestly being devastatingly bored and often cold and also doing that for like twenty hours a week something had to change. Either they needed to; stop playing soccer (kind of evil of me), I needed to not be involved (not the type of parent I want to be) or I had to get over myself and just get into too.
So the space piloted an intro to soccer class for people like me, who maybe had some relationship or interest in soccer but needed a safe-space to try it with out the intimidation of being competitive, or looking cool.
In the first class we stood in a circle and everyone said why they signed up. I admitted that I was tired of thinking I sucked at sports. I wanted to see if maybe it was possible that I didn’t suck? I was encouraged by a bit of laughter and a smattering of claps. Someone said they loved that. I relished in the positivity, so diametrically opposed to the snarky soviet one-liners I was used to whenever I tried something in earnest.
First I learned how to keep the ball in between my feet, repeating the boxes that I had watched my sons do hundreds of times. It was hard! Then I had to walk and do it. And then run. I did keep hearing my childhood memories of my dad making fun of me in my head, and at times it felt like I was truly too clumsy and slow and bad to even try.
But a few weeks of doing the class and I could move around with the ball at feet, defend it from others in our hilarious sharks vs minnows games, and even sometimes be the last minnow standing.
It is difficult to explain how truly moved and proud I was to not suck at this.
To hear my kids coach me from the sidelines “Don’t turn your back on the ball!” “Mom- shoot!” “ Mom - watch out! Man on! Man on!”
I bought myself my own soccer ball and wrote PATTI on it with a huge sharpie. I got turf shoes or as the kids call them “boots” and started to bring them to the sidelines of my kids practices and games and “get some touches in”. I liked the simplicity of that- I didn't need to train all day, just fuck around with the ball a few minutes a day.
My husband, ever supportive, but also ever-opportunistic pitched a beginners soccer league. In one afternoon he had designed kits with a Polish Bison on it and the word Śmiało - which roughly translates to “Go on! Be brave! Do it! a common phrase my dad barked at me when trying to get me to do things. He even gave me a captain arm-band.
We invited all of our friends and neighbors, parents of my friends kids from school , the head of the PTA, random co-workers of friends of friends, my brother and sister in law, my nephew and we had a team. We heat-pressed our patches onto kits and began to play once a week against other beginner teams. For me it was still really scary, and hard but it was also undeniably, extremely fun. I loved seeing my friends so often, without any need to plan or bring food or prepare. I have not had my goal yet in the league, but I did have a few assists and one actual game changing defensive stop against a player twice my size that I am super proud of and I think even my dad would have approved of.
Twenty year old me would not believe that in 2026 she’d be holding her dad’s American flag at a World Cup game, cheering, caring and even crying. That her two son’s would be able to juggle a soccer ball, dribble around her, and score and that she would enjoy it. That she would go watch her husband play in a Neighborhood World Cup at a soccer space he was a partner of, with top professional talent playing with her own soccer teachers. A space full of art and sports and community- a place that quite literally was beyond her imagination.
I wore a dress from my semester in Spain to a World Cup watch party at the new soccer space. I watched almost every game, from group stage to final. It’s been amazing to care so much about a thing that I avoided for so long. The regret is still there, I can’t talk about it with my dad, but there is something that gives me a little bit of comfort. He was wrong about there being no chance in hell that I could ever play. I can’t wait to do my little celebration dance and point up at the sky, as I dedicate my very first career goal to him. Time to get some touches in on the ball before the season starts back up.
I can imagine my dad saying “Śmiało Patki” Get up and go get it Patti.
Time lapse of me getting some touches in after one of my first soccer classes during my son’s soccer practice, which I usually watched sitting in a camping chair staring at my phone.