The chasm between golf and soccer

Spring is here, meaning that on Saturday mornings you can find me on one of three soccer fields at Laws Field in Eudora, Kan.

I coach youth soccer. My daughter Evey plays on a 1st/2nd grade team, while my son Boyd is enjoying his first taste of “organized” sports as a 3 year old. He plays for a kindergarten/pre-kindergarten team. So this season I’m enduring my first experience at back-to-back practices and games.

I started playing soccer in kindergarten, but my earliest memories of the sport are from 2nd grade, when my dad threatened my coach. Yeah, I know. I was a lousy athlete until maybe 10th grade (when, in my mind, I became an all-star), and my 2nd grade coach was fine with me sitting on the sideline most of the game.

I don’t remember if this upset me, but it clearly upset my dad, Boyd.

As we all walked to the parking lot after a game, snacks in hand, my dad unexpectedly confronted the coach about my lack of playing time. The coach snapped at him. My dad, a military man and an imposing figure, didn’t take kindly to it.

The exchange, as I remember it, went, “If you don’t like the way I’m coaching, you come out here and do it yourself,” with my dad responding, “I will… and we’re going to kick your ass!”

Not a highlight of my childhood, but a moment I look back and laugh at now. Dad did honor part of the exchange and coached my soccer and basketball teams from that point until junior high.

How much ass did we kick? Debatable, but it improves over time.

My earliest golf memories take place at a much later age. As a college kid, my roommate and I came out to Eudora to play a now-deceased little public course called Eudora Riverview. It flooded all the time, the clubhouse was the owner’s home, the concessions were on the honor system, and shirts, apparently, were optional.

My old friend John Wake and I took Clark Throssell out there. We drove my ’64 Impala to the course and crushed a few beers in the parking lot after our round. That’s a fond memory…

But still, I was an adult, coming late to the game. There’s a wide chasm between my early soccer memories and my early golf memories.

When I’m out on a Saturday morning coaching soccer I look at all the kids and the parents on the sidelines and I marvel at how successful this league is — especially for a town of 6,000. The parking lot is packed. Kids are lined up waiting for each game to end so they can take the field.

The National Golf Foundation recently announced its numbers for 2014 — a net loss of 128 18-hole facilities from 2013 to 2014. I’m an optimist, a glass-half-full kind of guy, but I can’t help but wonder how many soccer practice fields we lost in the same span… especially as I look around town trying to figure out a new location to hold a practice because the league schedule is booked solid.

We have great programs to get more people — including kids — into golf. But the best program, to this day, is a parent taking their child to the golf course.

I coach soccer because I have fond memories of my dad coaching me. I have no memories of playing golf with my dad, because we never golfed together.

Evey won’t remember it, but I have photos of her in a jogging stroller at a 9-hole course when she was a newborn. I take her to the local driving range. I want her to have fond memories of the game. I think that is a key to her wanting to keep the game in her life.