The Coach’s Daughter

Some of us played with ribbons in our hair because we liked the way they fluttered, because we were still girls, playing a girl sport. Some of us wore them ironically, though we couldn’t have said that at the time. Watch me, the ribbons said. And we were watched, mostly by men. In the Bay Area, in the ’90s, a barometer was rising. A pressure we couldn’t see, but could feel. A hunger in our coaches as they stalked the sidelines. This was ’91, ’92, ’93. Silicon Valley was earning its name. Men must have smelled it—a pheromone in the air. A potential. A becoming. And somehow, we were their ticket, a proxy for something they needed. So, when they pitted us one on one, two on two, we dribbled and obeyed. We worked in the hot sun, the smell of wet grass on our skin, in our clothes, the sweet stink of rot on our shin guards, in our cleats.

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We watched the Dutch masters: men, of course. We watched VHS tapes in crowded rooms between sessions, the afternoon ticking by with men in too-short orange shorts and the English with their lanky limbs. There were no videos of the South Americans. They were playing, and winning, but we weren’t watching because we were told what to watch, and from that, understood something about how to be: pliant, disciplined, orderly. Like the Dutch. They shielded us from clips of Maradona with his hair and his women and his cocaine. There were no women yet to watch, and, in lieu of Pele, the coaches inserted themselves. Chastain was in a weight room. Foudy at Stanford. Hamm shooting at the goal by herself. They were working, quietly. Cursing under their breath. Could we hear them? Could we smell their sweat?

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This was our golden age of American Youth Soccer: orange slices at halftime, Capri Suns after, the cover of fog lifting by the 10:00 am game. Dewed grass that would give way to the heat of the weekend. We played on teams we named ourselves: The Mean Green Machine, the Vicious Violets, the Turquoise Tornadoes. We were alliteratively fierce and loved the way our satin Adidas shorts shimmered in the sun.

I know the years by the coaches I had and the positions they assigned me; a mute timeline, punctuated by men who met us after work at IBM or Apple with cones and mesh nets full of balls. We were eight, nine. They picked those among us who would be the stars—the forwards, the strikers—and in that front line, they usually placed their own daughters.

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I remember one halftime as we ate obligatory oranges in Palo Alto under a grove of eucalyptus. The sidelines were dotted with our siblings and parents in chairs or on blankets. It was just a Saturday. We didn’t know that the stakes were quietly rising. Steve Jobs had begun screaming at an intern down the road. We were always being watched, always being shaped and reshaped to exceed the standards because, of course, they set the standards, and their dissatisfaction was rising.

A few minutes before halftime I threw a sweet fake and dribbled around an opponent close to the sideline. The parents, who were slung in chairs, hooted and clapped.

“Nice fake,” said my best friend, Somer. She was easy-natured, affable. Even though we weren’t allowed to sit on the balls, she always did, knees tucked on either side like small sphinx. She was the coach’s daughter.

“You should have passed it to Somer,” her father said, silencing the ring of girls around him. “She was open.”

I said nothing.

“You’re showing off,” he said. “It gets us nowhere when you show off.”

Dan, the man angry at me, the coach, was a close family friend. I knew him by his easy puns, the wisp of his silver hair, the fraternity paddles that hung silent and foreboding in his study. I spent every day after school with Somer. We still played dress-up together in our backyards...