soccer

Last night was the soccer draft. It was a live draft with 14 teams. 12 dads and two moms drafted their teams. Teams made up of ten and eleven year old girls.

It’s going to be a nice season. The teams are mostly fair and balanced. Jane gave me a list of girls she wanted to play with, and I didn’t get her top pick. It’s a bummer, but the girls will still have fun.

Two of the coaches are new to the region, so the group decided to share information with them, that way they could field the best possible teams. When someone asked about one of the girls the input was, “she’d be okay if she wasn’t so fat.”Which may have been accurate, but clearly wasn’t the kindest way of stating the facts. It wasn’t helped any when the other dads jumped in and started making jokes about Weight Watchers. There was 45 minutes of joking about the fat kid. Who, incidentally, is not particularly fat.

All of this from a group of short, fat, balding, hair dying, men sitting in the back room of a crappy diner in a middle class suburb of Los Angeles.

I wanted to punch them in the face.

I sat biting my tongue thinking, if this girl’s father was here right now there would be bloodshed, and I’d be rooting for him.

The guy next to me asked, “So are you going to blog about this?” And I said no.