Hello Soccer, Goodbye Life

“We’re gonna lose this game.”

Such is the sour assessment of the Soccer Dad, spoken to no one in particular as he paces the sidelines of the Arcadia playing field, a study in suburban sports concentration.

Nikki DaSilva, brown-skinned and barely 13, her blue uniform shiny under a bright sun, darts breathlessly across midfield. She is among the Glendale team’s star players, but even she cannot stop the red-haired girl with the ponytail from scoring through the unguarded left flank. In the bleachers, the San Gabriel parents rise to their feet cheering. Soccer Dad Michael DaSilva shakes his head in disappointment.

At that moment, a few miles away in Pasadena, Michael’s wife, Mytrang, also foot-soldiers on the soccer sidelines, watching intently as Erin, the couple’s 9-year-old daughter, loses her fourth straight spring league game. That morning, Mytrang awakened the kids, washed their uniforms and rounded up their shin guards, shoes and various-sized soccer balls. Then, with a quick kiss goodbye, the two Soccer Parents headed off in their separate directions, to the fields where they now participate in a peculiar, relatively new American pastime that requires extraordinary balance, timing, patience and strategy: Being a Soccer Family. Sometimes chasing a ball around a grass field is the easy part. There beside Mytrang, (pronounced ME-train) is 5-year-old Jeremy, an imaginative boy who likes to let his Popsicles melt all over his hands, spread his Battlestar Gallactica figures across the sidelines and drag his mother to the Andy Gump outhouse at least two times per half. Mytrang, a financial analyst on other days, has learned to watch the game looking over her shoulder, making sure she arrives back on the sidelines for the quarter breaks to offer water, advice or a pat on the back as needed.

While Mytrang paces the Pasadena sidelines, back in Arcadia another level of family dynamics is in play. Michael DaSilva, 40, has the easy demeanor of a young Bill Cosby and a career as a computer-service executive. But on this weekend, as on most weekends, his career, investments, house payments and just about everything else from the adult world have faded from his consciousness.

“Hey Nik, it’s time to step up,” Michael calls out. “You just passed the ball to nobody.”

Nikki looks toward the sidelines, shooting DaSilva one of those dirty “Daddy, I hate you” glares that only a father could inspire. It’s a silent scowl--funny, actually, if you aren’t on its receiving end--intended to transform her father into stone, a glower that, in the movies Nikki likes to watch, would have whipped up some malevolent wind to destroy his house, his car and everything he owns.

“Uh-oh, she’s mad at me now,” Nikki’s dad says. “But she knows I’m right.”

The rejoinder is classic Soccer Parent, and that, of course, is what the DaSilvas have become--one soccer couple amid tens of thousands of moms and dads across Southern California and America who have watched their adult lives slowly disappear into a frenetic blur of goals: goals scored by kicking a ball into a big white net, and those trickier to define and achieve.

When Nikki DaSilva’s team loses, for instance, her dad swallows his disappointment and appears, as always, at his daughter’s side with a towel and Coleman cooler. As she tips the jug, quenching her thirst, he tugs on her pigtail. “Good game, Nik,” the Soccer Dad says. “Real good game.”

*

In sunny Los Angeles, soccer is a year-round endeavor. From January through December, there are games and more games played, coached and observed by a sports fraternity that includes families of every ethnic, economic and attitudinal combination. For these loyal participants in the volunteer American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), there is no escape. Theirs is a round-the-clock soccer subculture, filled with kids, ego-driven coaches, other parents (often grumpier than their children), hectic schedules, practices, bad-attitude referees (see parents), more practice, still more games, seminars, father-to-daughter pep talks and mother-and-son strategy sessions. Eighteen million Americans played the sport at least once last year, and the number of serious players--who played more than 25 days--rose from 7.7 million to 8.5 million, according to the Soccer Industry Council of America. Kids are playing, too. Some 3 million players under age 19 compete in three leagues. AYSO, the dominant youth-soccer force in California, encompasses 250,000 kids--nearly half its total of 600,000 players in this state. Around L.A., more children are playing soccer than baseball and football combined. And, as the DaSilvas know, it’s not enough to just watch from the sidelines.

For them, the sport is a symbol of the modern parent’s child-crazy life, in which average moms and dads limit their own social events, rearrange their work schedules, forsake golf outings with the boys and often get too tired to do or think about anything but soccer. Along with being a soccer referee and coach of her son Jeremy’s team, Mytrang is also the first woman to have taken on the thankless job of commissioner for AYSO’s Region 88. As head of the Glendale-La Crescenta area, she oversees 2,380 suburban youngsters on 153 teams. Michael is an all-star commissioner--coordinating postseason play. He also coaches Erin’s team, referees games and, like his wife, plays cheerleader at his children’s endless succession of soccer games.

For much of the year, each week is jammed with soccer practices leading up to countless games on Soccer Saturdays and Sundays. This is, in other words, the Soccer Life, as evidenced by a family that huddles together over the summer to watch the World Cup on Spanish-language television, even though they can’t understand the words; by a couple who long ago stopped visiting new restaurants but know the directions to every soccer field in the San Gabriel Valley; by a backyard swimming pool that, in late June, still harbors a muddy wintertime soup because nobody can take time away from The Soccer Life to clean it.

After the children’s first games of the day one recent Sunday, Nikki referees a boys’ soccer game and then the family reconvenes at their La Crescenta home. Not for long, though. After Mom and Dad grill hot dogs for lunch, it’s back into the red van with the “KIDZ CAR” license plate and off to another field, where Nikki plays her second and third games. Only many soccer-addled hours later, after the children have nodded off, will Mytrang wrap up the leftover soccer business and climb into bed for her day’s first “nothing-to-do-with-soccer” conversation with her husband.

Once sleep comes, however, Mytrang’s mind returns to soccer--to unsettled images of teenage goalies diving to block sizzling free kicks, and an endless avalanche of nylon jerseys and soccer socks toppling in a monster-sized clothes dryer.

*

At age 38, Mytrang Dasilva still wonders about her weirdly winding route to becoming a Soccer Mom. Back in her native Vietnam, she didn’t play sports of any kind. Same with Michael, who grew up an Army brat, a “Poindexter” who wasn’t very athletic. Until they became parents, neither knew a keeper from a sweeper.

Their first daughter changed all that. By age 3, Nikki had already pointed to kids booting the soccer ball around an area park, prompting Mom to ask, “How do you sign your kid up?” Two years later, Nikki was a pint-sized Fire Ant, a tiny thing in baggy shorts and a new red-and-black jersey, dwarfed by the chasm of the goal box. Slowly, despite her initial struggles with asthma, Nikki improved. The little girl got game. And Mom learned more about the The Soccer Life.

“I had no concept of how much time and energy it took to make the league run,” she recalls. She watched all these devoted soccer supporters with amazement. “Do these people even get paid?” she wondered. The astonishing answer was no. She decided she had to do her fair share.

Michael, too, reached a conclusion about youth soccer: that he could coach a helluva lot better than the coach. He began reading books and watching soccer on TV, studying the game’s nuances. When Erin started playing, he became assistant coach of her team, the Tiny Toons. Right away, the Soccer Dad got a lesson in coaching: Problem was, Erin simply refused to do what her father told her. Recalls Mytrang: “I’d come to the field and she’d be pouting and he’d be mad, saying, ‘You have to talk to your daughter. She won’t listen to me.’ ” Michael remembers those Soccer Wars with a wince. “She was a stubborn little thing. But I’m just as stubborn as she is. I’d become one of those parents who live out unrealized dreams through their kid, saying things like, ‘If I were you, I’d do things this way.’ ” he says. “I finally realized that this wasn’t about me. It was about the kids.”

Still, Michael was intense. During one game, he called out Erin’s name 42 times from the sidelines. One opposing player looked over at the girl.

“Is that your father?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Erin replied.

“He sure yells a lot,” the other girl said.

Mytrang got her own dose of the kiddie blues as coach of Jeremy’s first soccer team, the Gray Sharks. In youth soccer, beginners are known as daisy-pickers, easily distracted during games. Worse, their field mentality is to swarm the ball, creating a mobile mob packed into 1/20th of the expansive field. Coaching a dozen 5-year-olds, Mytrang soon learned, was akin to herding polyester-clad kittens. “Jeremy would suddenly just walk off the field, saying things like, ‘I’m too sweaty.’ Or I’d put in another player and he’d get mad and refuse to play. He’d say, ‘I don’t like you anymore. I quit.’ To get him to cooperate, I had to negotiate how many books we were going to read that night.”

Mytrang knew there were other rebellious tykes on the team. And if you couldn’t handle your own kid, how could you get a grip on a dozen sassy little strangers? “When you coach your own child, they look at you with those moon eyes to say, ‘Mommy, I’m your son, I’m your baby.’ They learn fast that it’s tough being the coach’s kid.”

From the beginning, Mytrang has been the driving force behind this Soccer Family. While Michael is usually content to see his children involved, she restlessly pushes them to get better, nudging them to play against older, more advanced competition. She pushes herself as well. As commissioner, Mytrang oversees a $200,000 annual budget. When she took the job, a friend called to offer congratulations. And condolences.

Now Mytrang runs monthly meetings with other league officials--gatherings previously populated mostly by men. While many are former jocks, they have nonetheless learned to respect this woman commissioner’s soccer acumen and passion for the game. Right away, Mytrang got a full-blown dose of soccer management--the politics, back-stabbing and infighting. Often, she has had to steal time from her career to get her arms around the volunteer job. Her most indelible lesson? In youth soccer, there are no problem children, only problem parents: parents who complain that their children aren’t getting enough playing time, who gripe that the coach’s kid gets all the attention. There are foreign-language-speaking parents, who yell to their children, “Hit ‘em with an elbow,” assuming that others can’t understand. And parents who blow off games and practices, disappointing their children and everyone else.

She has dealt with unscrupulous coaches who have stolen star players from other teams. And those with such an obsession to win that they treat players like little employees. Mytrang hears it all: One night she had 32 messages on her home answering machine. All of them had to do with soccer.

Michael, too, has learned--and not just that the keeper is the goalie and the sweeper a key defensive player who ranges the field and had best have a kick like a mule. He’s become a real coach, not just a coaching parent. After that embattled first season, he and daughter Erin have bonded. Now Erin even seeks her dad out to talk soccer.

“One fun thing about soccer,” Michael says, “is that most times the kids know more about the game than you do.”

*

Tiny Erin Dasilva has an offbeat sense of humor. She likes watching her dad’s mouth hang open when he falls asleep in his chair after dinner. But she doesn’t laugh when he yells on the soccer field. “I just think, ‘Why is he getting mad at me? I’m the one who’s doing all the work.’ ”

Erin shares a bunk bed with her older sister. Neither have discovered boys yet. What they know is soccer, the medals in their room hanging as shiny testimonials to The Life. Sometimes Erin gets jealous of Nikki. All her soccer friends think her sister is so good. And Nikki makes fun of Erin’s game, comparing her to a little Sherman tank once she gets the ball. “Erin doesn’t want me at her practices,” Nikki says. “She says I cross the line when I try to teach her stuff.”

“Well,” Erin says, “you get a little carried away.”

The ones who really get carried away, the girls say, are their parents.

They put on so much pressure--like their mother’s insistence that they always play against older kids. It gets embarrassing. Like the opponent who mocked Erin’s teammate during a game they lost 8-0: “This is boring,” she announced. “Our coach told us not to score anymore.”

Nikki wants a bigger voice in how much soccer she plays. “Some coach will ask if I can play in a tournament, and my parents will say yes when I’m not even there to decide.”

Her perfect weekend doesn’t even involve soccer. Well, maybe one game. But the rest of the time she’d just as well hang out with her brother and sister. Then she stops, reconsiders. “I guess if I didn’t play soccer, I’d be pretty bored.”

What keeps her coming back to the game is a mental image that plays out in slow motion inside her head. It goes like this: Nikki gets the ball in front of the net.

“As I’m shooting, I’m laughing,” she says. “The keeper is looking at me with this panicky ‘Don’t shoot!’ look. But the ball goes in. It’s so great.”

*

For soccer families like the DaSilvas, these days and nights on the fields are an all-too-brief confluence, where the sport of soccer and the game of life come together. For them, the Soccer Life offers more than enough reward to overcome the exhaustion--including a sense of community almost unheard of in Los Angeles, and a confidence that their children are safe because like-minded adults are always looking out for them.

These parents are willing to go to any length to send their children spiraling toward adulthood with ample memories of what it was like to do things as a family. Their Soccer Lives give them the satisfaction of watching their child’s game evolve from an undisciplined swarm mentality to something rivaling true individual grace and athleticism. It offers them an opportunity to watch their kids savor the sweetness of scoring a first goal and then immediately look toward the stands, knowing their parents were there to witness it.

Parents who first nudge their children onto the field in hopes they’ll have some fun and get some exercise soon catch wind of other benefits. Soccer Moms like Mytrang DaSilva know that, unlike other team sports, soccer is a game in which everyone plays. That alone has done wonders for the self-esteem of many teenage girls, allowing them to compete and excel at a game with essentially the same rules as the one the boys play. And with girls now making up 40% of the youth soccer ranks nationwide, Soccer Parents can only be comforted to learn that teenage females who play sports are less likely to get pregnant, more likely to have their first sexual experience later in adolescence and likely to have fewer sex partners than their nonathletic counterparts, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation.

Says Mytrang: “I’m watching my kids grow from*being little girls to confident young women, right there on the soccer field.”

*

On father’s day week-end, the sounds of soccer resonate across the lawn outside the Rose Bowl, where 95 area teams have gathered for a fund-raising tournament that will net $30,000.

Like peacocks, the soccer coaches strut the sidelines of all nine playing fields--tall men in Plantation hats, stocky little characters with baseball hats and cigarette voices, gray-haired women with clipboards and attitude.

One illustrates the game’s niceties to his players. “You can’t slam him with your butt,” he says, demonstrating on one unlucky kid. “That’s football.”

Nearby, another coach espouses a different philosophy: “Throw a body on somebody.” he screams to his girls. “Remember, no weenies on my team.”

The weekend has been a tough one for one Soccer Dad. In the end, the season is a loser for the DaSilvas, and this final weekend fits a pattern that in many ways is distressing. By Sunday morning, Michael DaSilva has already officiated eight games--while trying to watch his own daughters’ contests. He’s sweaty, he’s tired and he wants to take the family over to his own dad’s house for a Father’s Day visit. But as he’s done so many times, he bites his lip and waits--this time for Erin’s team to lose their last game and, still-proud, line up to collect their medals.

Since Mytrang started as commissioner, family tensions have risen. The DaSilvas finally decided that surviving The Life also means learning how to sometimes say no to soccer. Recently they agreed to a few house rules: No calls after 9 p.m. Mom and Dad want to see a few more movies and are planning a non-soccer family vacation after last summer’s fiasco, when they took just three weekends off from the sport.

Still, the obligations can be overwhelming. Michael says the phone calls bug him the most. “I have to tell her, ‘OK, I’ve been home for two hours now, and you’ve been on the phone the whole time talking about soccer. It’s not right.”

DaSilva’s wife and daughters laugh him off, calling him a Grouchy Old Man. But his complaints hit home. Sometimes even Mytrang tires of dashing off for soccer meetings, leaving her family rushed dinners--one night candy bars and 7-Up.

Soccer Parents believe, though, that such day-to-day madness pays long-term dividends. “There’s a saying that while your kids will never remember the gifts you bought, they’ll always recall the time you spent with them,” Michael says. “That’s us. Soccer brings us together.”

*

For most of the summer, the family took a breather from soccer, limiting itself to the occasional game, a few practices and late-night organizing meetings. But now it is suddenly September. Now the real soccer season is about to begin again. Again such places as Arcadia, La Crescenta, Torrance, Pasadena, El Segundo and East Los Angeles are about to become weekend Soccer Cities, swarming with young uniformed hordes.

For the DaSilvas, this is the most exciting time of the year. The kids are all a year older, bigger and faster than they were last fall. Expectations are high.

“Every fall we come alive,” Mytrang says. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s OK. This is our time.”

For the Glendale-La Crescenta league, opening-day ceremonies will be at Glendale College next Sunday. Then all 153 teams will play on 11 fields scattered around the region.

All told, between now and Christmas, Michael and Mytrang DaSilva will divide their energies among a total of 50 soccer games and another 70 or so practices. (That does not include playoffs, which will continue into the spring.)

This fall, Mytrang will be conducting a Monday night soccer-skills clinic for kids and coaches. Already, nearly 100 people per week are signing up to attend.

Nikki is moving on to soccer’s next step. This season, in addition to her AYSO games, she’ll play in a super-serious club soccer league in which coaches and officials are paid and players have dreams of college soccer scholarships.

But nobody has changed more than 5-year-old Jeremy. No longer just a daisy-picker, he has put on weight over the summer and has suddenly gone soccer crazy, kicking the ball around the backyard and even the living room.

One night, the Soccer Dad sees his son dribble the ball across the kitchen floor and can’t contain his joy.

“Jeremy, you’re really going to score some goals for me this year, aren’t you?” he asks.

Mytrang can only shake her head. “Already,” she laughs, “the pressure is beginning.”