Champions
Friday March 28, 2025
I’m gonna sound like an asshole for a second. I have no idea how many intramural and adult recreational soccer championships I’ve won, but whatever the number, the most recent is always the best.
Last night, my BSSC indoor team won the championship, 4-2. We finally beat this annoying ass Gold team that beat us once and forced a draw in the second match after we blew a 2-goal lead. Championship is the only one that matters!
I will say it has been a little while since I won one. The leagues around here last for about eight weeks at a time, with maybe one or two weeks between them, and I play in at least one pretty much all year. Some quick shitty math suggests that’s at least four or five seasons each year. Add the same number while living in LA, plus three seasons each year of college, and we’re looking at something like 50-60 seasons of recreational soccer. Like I said, I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve won it all, but I’d guess it isn’t more than 12. When you measure your life in numbers, these are the ones that matter, and after winning one for the first time in what feels like 2 or 3 years last night, I’m forced to consider just what a huge part of my life socially competitive soccer has been.
About half of those championships were likely in college when there were really only two decent teams: The Dascomb Deatheaters (a team comprised of people who lived together in the Dascomb first-year dorm and stayed together all four years) and whatever team I was on (I was basically a mercenary my first two years before recruiting a more constant team with my friend, Tani, in the last two). Me and whatever team I was with played Dascomb at least three times in the championship and won at least twice, but I can’t really remember except for the spring season of my senior year, which we won 3-2 in the pouring rain after I sniped the game-winner from outside the box with like 10 minutes left. Glory days and all that.
I have a lot of regrets about Oberlin — basically summed up by going there in the first place — but one of my biggest is compartmentalizing soccer and my social life. During freshman year, a team of junior and senior former athletes recruited me to play with them after seeing me practice with the varsity team, but whenever they invited me to go drinking after games, I always had some excuse. Homework. No fake ID. Whatever. I convinced myself that I wanted to spend more time with the friends my own age that I was making — many of whom, I finally realized by senior year, didn’t really like me.
It’s so easy in adulthood to forget about age; just ask the 20-somethings on my team who were flabbergasted last night to learn I’m 34. But at 18 or 19 years old, you care about superficial things like why a 21-year-old with a bar pass would ever want to be friends with you, and if they’re graduating in a couple of years anyway, why should they waste their time? I would have liked to get to know those guys better, but I was weird in college about keeping soccer about soccer and never really got close to anyone I played with.
Maybe that’s a subconscious reason why I made soccer such a central part of my social life in LA. After a couple of years of rotating through a social circle comprised of Oberlin acquaintances, the 40-somethings I met while drinking alone at a bar one night, a couple of work people, a couple of softball people, and these Finnish girls who found their way in there somehow, I was feeling pretty lonely when I started playing soccer again. I signed up as a free agent and, after a couple of dud seasons playing with bad weirdos (weird people who are obsessed with soccer but suck at it are a special breed of bad company), I hit the jackpot with a team on which everybody got along. On a team in which only two people knew each other prior, that was an absolute miracle.
You may not realize this, but many people who play adult sports are fucking obnoxious. There are people:
Who take it too seriously
Who compartmentalize it like I did in college and have no interest in the social aspect
Who have been long-time fans of the game but never had an access point to play until adulthood and have a compulsion to try to play like Neymar or Kobe because they have no concept of skill development — they’ve just seen guys on TV
Who never sub out because they genuinely believe their presence is essential to victory
Who loudly berate teammates and try to talk tactics only to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s actually happening in the game
In soccer especially, who have no concept of positioning and situational awareness, which is by far my biggest pet peeve because simply putting in some effort and not standing right on top of a teammate is the EASIEST thing to do, regardless of talent. Then they get pissed for not getting the ball or when the person they were supposed to be marking scores.
In LA, our team was not very good, but everyone was self-aware. We all just wanted to run around a bit and then go to Cabo Cantina to knock back some double margaritas. (We tried Dark and Stormy’s before a game once, but Stephen broke his leg, so we went back to only post-game drinking.) Over the years, we added a few friends and coworkers to the group, got better, and we did eventually win a championship… I’m pretty sure it was at Palisades High School, too, which is eerily no longer there.
Frankly, I don’t remember the soccer as much because those people became some of my best friends — more than adequate substitutes for the ones I might have made in college if I wasn’t so fucking coy. The many moments off the field are far more memorable. (Obligatory Emma namedrop because I told her I would.)
In Boston, I’m in a different stage of my life, and I’m not really desperate for friendship anymore. I’m home. I have people. Soccer will always be about fun first for me, but there’s more room to feel competitive. It helps that the level of competition is surprisingly much higher here than in LA, too.
I’ve gone through many teammates and team iterations and, fortunately, my teams have pretty much always been decent to good. One of the first teams I got randomly put onto won three straight titles, and we were starting to hang out on off days and stuff, but then three of the core members moved out of town, and we stopped winning due to a few people suddenly feeling the need to do way too much all the time. The team disbanded.
I bounced around for a while before meeting Ben Schindler and Zoë Garrett, two people who have been excellent ringleaders for teams the last three years or so. We’ve had some good teams, but we took a couple of seasons off recently after Ben had a kid, and some on-field bullshit made me unwilling to play again with a few people.
Zoë pulled this indoor team together with her new roommate, Renee, Renee’s cousin, his coworkers, plus a few fortunate free agents added by the league office. It was my first time playing with everyone except for Zoë, and I was not expecting to have as much fun as I did. Everyone vibed, we played well together, and despite a couple of shitty showings, we played by far our best game of the season when it mattered most. It was a nice balance of good team and good people this season, and hopefully, we’ll stick together for another one at least.
We’ve got more championships to win.
One Song: “Cry For You” by September
“We Are The Champions” was the easy choice, but winning got me thinking about my high school soccer days. At Curtis and Kirkley Cheney’s wedding a few years ago, Terence Morrissey, who was a sophomore on that team, told me his favorite memory of my gilded senior season (one day we’re going to talk about the incredible disappointment of Hingham’s 2008-2009 soccer and baseball teams) was blaring house music from my van before every practice. This was one of my favorites at the time.
One Book: Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made by David Halberstam
Halberstam’s one of the greatest sports journalists ever, and his book on Michael Jordan is riveting stuff. Jordan should be a far more polarizing character, but he’s so damn charismatic you overlook much of the shitty, illegal, and downright sadistic shit he did throughout his career. Even in this book, which is part Jordan biography and part chronicle of his Chicago Bulls’ second three-peat after his return from a “self-imposed” baseball exile, Halberstam is unabashedly admiring of Jordan’s overwhelming will and charisma despite the unflinching look behind the curtain of Jordan’s rule.
One Quote: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." - Michael Jordan
This is a perfect example of why Jordan’s weirdo behavior is always overlooked, and why he’s one of my favorite athletes of all time. This is the greatest basketball player ever assessing himself through failure. Ted Williams has similar quotes about baseball, Wayne Gretzky has that famous one about missing all the shots you don’t take, but Jordan citing specific numbers to illustrate how much you have to fail in order to succeed at the highest level is beautifully and psychotically dialed in. (Btw, he was 0-6 vs. Larry Bird in the playoffs.)
One Hollywood: Hoosiers, Prime Video
There are plenty of good sports movies about overcoming adversity, yada yada. I thought about Miracle, He Got Game, The Mighty Ducks, The Luck of the Irish… but landed on Hoosiers since we’re in the thick of March Madness and Gene Hackman died recently. Haven’t seen it in a while but worth a rewatch.
One Place: Wrigley Field
It took 114 years, but the Cubs finally won a World Series in dramatic fashion in 2016. Lindsay and I are going to Chicago for her April vacation and will hit Wrigley to see the Cubs play the Dodgers, so what the hell, let’s tie it in here. It’ll be my 13th MLB stadium. I’ve heard great things about Wrigley — the National League’s version of Fenway Park — and it should be a highlight of our trip.
Thought our volleyball team was gonna get a mention