The not quite ready for prime time player.

A couple of weeks ago Drew came home from soccer practice angry, disillusioned, and ready to quit. He's on a new team this fall, for a couple of reasons, the biggest being because my husband couldn't coach his soccer team anymore. Work is killing him, and leaving the office before 6pm twice a week was making other people passive-aggressively question his work ethic, not exactly something you want floating around out there in this kind of economy. So he resigned as head coach of Drew's team.

The second thing that happened is that we've finally reached that age where boys kind of figure out where their athletic strengths are, and it gets harder and more competitive, and the moms and dads are tired of driving team carpool every single night of the week, and the conflagration of these things forces a decision on which sports to focus, and which to drop. And so several of our little team's stronger players chose to focus on football, and dropped fall soccer.

There were six boys left who wanted to play from that team. So we got slapped together with another small team, and a dad who volunteered to coach it from that other team who had never done so before, and there you have the recipe for more drama than I had bargained for.

But I don't want him to quit playing soccer. Oh I'd be fine if he decided that he just wasn't into it anymore, or if maybe another activity was becoming more interesting and he'd prefer to engage in something else. But I don't want him to quit because he's miserable and and it's not fun anymore and the coach yells at him, and also that coach is not his dad. (Who, for the record, did a pretty good job at not sparing Drew when he needed to run laps for misbehaving or not having his head in the game.)

(And who also, for the record, is wallowing in his guilt at having to give up coaching his son in a sport that was his own favorite as a boy. The guilt, it buuuuurnnnnnnsssss the poor man.)

So I started looking around for options for Drew to play competitive soccer. We missed the window for tryouts back in June, we were out of town or something, and also I just didn't want to pay the money - it's about $1000-1300 a year to play competitive team soccer rather than rec. But, I figured, if he's good enough to play at the competitive level, and he likes it, then it's worth the money.

Last week we were invited to come practice with a competitive team on Tuesday night. It drizzled the entire hour and a half of the practice, and I stood there in the light rain watching him play with these other kids and a professional coach - kids were all bigger, faster, and more disciplined - that was clear really quickly. But he hung in there pretty well, had fun, and seemed to like it. The coach invited us back for this Tuesday to more officially try-out, rather than just play around and be introduced.

My husband says to me this morning, quietly, "Listen, I don't think he wants to do this. I think you want to do this." Which is entirely possible. But I am not that parent, I am not going to push my kid into a sports commitment that he doesn't want just so I can tell people he plays competitive soccer, that was not why I started this whole thing. I started it to give him some options, to show him what a higher challenge looks like, and see if was ready to face that challenge. I have better things to do than drive him across town on more evening a week, at an extra cost to boot.

So I asked him. And he said no, he doesn't want to do it. He said he didn't want to leave his teammates that came with him from the other team in the lurch, having to play without him. I understand what he means, his fragile little ego regarding how much they need him aside. What he really means, whether he knows it or not, is he needs them. And he is not quite ready, not quite bored enough, to face that higher level of challenge. And that is totally fine. He's only nine years old.

So we play rec soccer for another year. He agreed not to whine and complain about the coach, that he's choosing to stay on this team over other options. He made a choice, and I'm very proud of him.