Get in the van. I'm playing today.
I am a Soccer Mom—capital S, capital M. Today I am sprinting around town to satisfy my 7-year-old daughter Meg's itch to own a pair of cleatless indoor soccer shoes. These shoes are to be worn not for sport, but to make a statement: "I am a soccer player." A dedicated member of the Blue Dolphins, Meg will wear her Adidas as her badge. And why not? She's entitled.
I am glad she feels that way, and not just because I'm her mother. I recently became a soccer player, too. I'm a defenseman on a team of 30- and 40-something women in the inter- mediate league of the Montclair (New Jersey) Soccer Moms. The difference is it took me years to feel the entitlement my second grader wears down to the tips of her Adidas-clad toes.
I can't take credit for Meg's athleticism. I am not the role model here. She is. Three years ago she joined a non-competitive program called Kinderkickers, and she s never looked back. She even helped the Dolphins win their opening game by scoring her first goal ever. At her coach's instruction, she ran down the field, received a pass and knocked it into the goal. A moment later she was beaming from her very core. It was impossible not to be affected by her sense of accomplishment.
As for my team, how shall I put it? We love what we do. We are moms (most of us) as well as wives and career women. It would help if we were better-conditioned, but most of us haven't played soccer (or pursued any other sport so devotedly) since college or even high school. But we do have a sense of humor. How else could we call ourselves The Chicks with Cleats? We also have enough offensive strength (check out Shelley's awesome banana kick) and defensive grit (test fullback Lisa's goal defense) that after our first season we moved out of the beginner's league and into the intermediate league, a source of inordinate pride. Every Alonday night we take the field against the Pokemoms or the Beanie Babes, and go at it. We dribble, grunt and knock down the opposition then help them up. We commiserate over bruises and sprains. And we sweat. God, it's fun.
You'd have to have been stuck on Mir not to know how big women's soccer has become—from kindergartners up to the World Cup participants. It helped that the U.S. women's soccer team captured media attention last summer with its stun- ning World Cup victory. Those of us weekend soccer warriors who watched did so feeling a connection, albeit an old and worn shoelace of a connection, to those talented young women who had been toiling away in relative obscurity for years. When Brandi Chastain made the game-winning penalty kick, we exalted with her.
Now that I'm playing, I've taken notice as Dartmouth women's soccer has also risen out of the haze of those first years of women's sports at the College. A club sport when I arrived in Hanover until the late 19705, the team now dominates the Ivy League and is a major force in the Northeast. Last season, goalie Kristen Luckenbill '01 placed sixdi in the nation for her goals-against average, and two of her teammates were named first team allAmericas. The Big Green went all the way to the NCAA quarterfials that year, stopped only by North Carolina, the soccer stronghold that gave us Mia Hamm, the top scorer in women's soccer history. This year, the Dartmouth team filled its pre-season itinerary with a series of challenge matches in Scandinavia, where they competed against some of the world's premier players.
For my first foray into soccer last March, I laced up my old Puma Pioneers, the very same cleats I wore in the spring of '78 to play for Dartmouth's first women's rugby club team. Not that I had felt a strong athletic urge in college or a need to join those first beneficiaries of Title IX in their quest for sports equality. I had gone out for rugby because I had a crush on the coach. (I lso have a crush on my current soccer coach, but I'm married to him.) The urge to get in shape came later, in my 20s running in Central Park and, in my 30s tackling the New York City Marathon. Only then, at 36, did I begin to feel entitled to call myself an athlete. My Jogbra became my badge. Hidden though it was under my Dartmouth T-shirt, I wore it with pride.
Still, as we Chicks were to play our first game, I was hit by a wave of nausea: What was I doing here? I looked across at the opposition, dressed in forest green T-shirts. One shirt stood out. Emblazoned with 81, it looked like the Dartmouth jerseys Campion's store gave out during Freshman Week 1977. I realized I was staring at classmate Susan Murr. Instandy, Irelaxed I knew I was in good company. I couldn't wait to run circles around her, certain she'd be trying to do the same to me.
Unlike the rest of my life, soccer is uncomplicated (our ob-jectives are clear: score and defend the goal) and liberating (50 minutes focused solely on those objectives—no phones, no kids, no deadlines). It's a chance to be with a group of women I barely know but whom I've grown to love. Gradually, I have come to understand that being an athlete and I finally believe I am one—has little to do with being a slimmer, trimmer me. Nor is it about being the best. Showing up, playing hard, communicating, being a good sport and appreciating the opposition for doing the same—that's what it's about.
And while I am busy blocking would-be goal scorers with my aggressive (if not pretty) footwork and tackles, I hope that, like Mia, Brandi and Kristen, I am being a role model after all, setting an example for three little girls, my daughters. I am proud that my Meg already considers herself an athlete. ("What's the big deal, Mom?") In time, I trust her sisters will feel the same. Ihope hatMeg will not lose that confidence as she grows up, the way they say girls do. If watching Mom play soccer helps her to hold on to her "no big deal" sense of entitlement, then I will have scored a major goal.
And the Chicks? What we lack in ball control and scoring skills we make up for, like Meg, with a sheer enjoyment of the game. We revel in our 50 minutes of playing time, exhilarating as our children do, as Ivy League athletes and world-class wonders do, in the glorious purity of play. It's what allows me, a once-a-week jock, to imagine myself with the Chicks at the World Cup, beating up the opposition with my rekndess shots on goal. It's down to penalty kicks. Our goalie blocks one of theirs. Yours truly strikes the ball squarely. It flashes past their netminder.
GOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLL!
Go ahead. Dare me to run out on the field with fists clenched, to rip off my jersey and expose—a la Chastain—my badge of honor, my Jogbra, to the crowd.
Hear me roar. I am Soccer Mom.
I am not the role model here. My 7-year-old daughter is.
PATRICIA E. BERRY is a freelance writer based in soccer-mad Montair, N.J.
