Introduction Driving out of Athens, Ohio, that Sunday afternoon in late August 2021, our angry and anxious shouts ricocheted around the family Subaru. Which was odd, seeing that my seventeen-year-old daughter, Scout, my wife, and I had just achieved an improbable, long-cherished shared family dream: Scout had just accepted a Division I soccer scholarship at Ohio University. This was exactly what she--and so, we--had wanted and worked for and traded many other pleasures for, for many years. Her highest soccer goal was achieved. Her college situation was settled. Her future, grayed out for years by the vagaries of college-sports recruiting (and exacerbated by Covid), was suddenly as vivid as the green Appalachian foothills out our windows. Why weren''t we relieved, ecstatic, proud, grateful? We didn''t exactly know. And I guess that''s part of what we were shouting about.

You may be wondering: What in the world is the matter with this family? That''s what I''m writing this book to try to explain--to other soccer dads, and soccer moms. And all parents whose kids are involved in all serious youth sports (and maybe other competitive pursuits, like ballet or concert violin). All the parents who are trying to sanely see their kids to a happy ending of a chain reaction that probably began as childhood recreation, that begat joy, that begat pride, that begat ambition, that begat a dream--that also begat a whole lot of pain and confusion in the family''s pursuit. My main qualification for writing Soccer Dad is actually my lack of qualification as a soccer dad. I knew nothing about soccer when my daughter started playing it (and I know little about it still). The travel-sports landscape was unknown to me then, and I might not navigate it much better now if I had a chance to do it again. I can''t tell you how to guide your kid--or steer yourself--through this process. I do let myself hope that reading this book might make you perhaps more conscious than I was, from beginning to middle to end, of both the inevitable trade-offs and available joys in modern youth sports.

Your whole family should understand that the sacrifices are not only financial, and the dangers are not only physical. We generally think of sports as being good for kids'' minds, bodies, and souls. But as youth sports gets less playful all the time, the participants put those minds, bodies, and souls to severe tests at vulnerable young ages. While dealing with self-interested club owners and semicompetent coaches in a youth sports system that runs on money and insidious family vanity, a sports parent needs all the skill and luck that every parent needs to raise a solid human being--and maybe more. You''re trying to shape your kid into someone with sufficient ego to want the ball in the clutch and sufficient humility to pass it to an open teammate; someone with a laser focus and a wide aperture both; someone driven and loving, too. Parents who unfold their new canvas camping chairs on their first sideline thinking this is the "fun" part of being a dad or mom will be surprised by how much work it is. I believe that more conscious and collectively communicative sports parents can mitigate against the dangers and pitfalls of youth sports--or even, in your own corner of this world, fight against them. I also believe that such parents can more fully appreciate, and help their children realize, the joys of all this: the on-field competition and hotel-lobby camaraderie, the common cause, and the humor in the inherently absurd exercise of driving young children long distances to play in important games that no one will remember in five years, in pursuit of some future glory that dare not speak its name, for fear of sounding silly.

I hope that reading this book gives you comfort in knowing you''re neither unique nor unjustified in your confusion, ambivalence, mixed motivations, anxiety, and occasional outrage. Indeed, something would be badly wrong with you if you didn''t have these feelings much of the time on this jangled journey down the yellow brick road of modern youth sports. Acknowledging those feelings and immutable facts of modern youth sports life--and sharing them with other parents on the sideline at every stage--might allow you (all) to hold fast to that original delight, the essential beauty, the deep thrill you felt the first time you saw your kid run her very fastest with a lot of other happy kids, up and back, up and back, in an open green field. Witnessed astonishment give way to pride on her face when she scored her first goal. Heard her giggle with her teammates at the ice cream place, after. No matter how serious youth sports becomes, and it becomes very serious indeed, the joy, the pride, the love is what must remain the highest purpose of all this--in fact, the only purpose, in the end. And I should say that despite all the Sturm und Drang I''ll express in these pages, all the mistakes I''ll admit to making as a soccer dad, all the ignorance you''ll discover and the doubt that remains, I''m ultimately proud of the way my wife and I handled this, from the beginning through the middle to what we thought was the end--and to the end. And I want you to know that you can handle it well and feel proud, too.