Sometimes you just need something silly. Kids will like Taylor Swift’s video. But Moms, the second one is good to play when you just need something mindless. Enjoy!

Taylor Swift as a Minnesota Soccer Mom

No offense Minnesota Moms, I think the accents are sketchy.

In one of the largest, longest and most drawn-out campaigns of all time, the U.S. Bid Committee for a bid to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018 or 2022 has named 18 host cities.

Charlotte is not included. Neither are Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Jacksonville, Oakland, Orlando, St. Louis and San Francisco. But since our youngest will be out of college by time the games get here, I guess Mr. Watson and I can travel to Nashville or Atlanta to catch some of the action!

The next level of competition is to determine which of the 18 cities will host the finals, etc. Catch the action at The Game Is In Us (get it? Us=U.S.) and sign the petition to bring the games back to the U.S.

If you care to donate to this cause, by the way, the bumper stickers are quite cool. (I grabbed a few free ones at a tournament in November).

Comment below: where will YOU be in 2018 or 2022? And did your city make the cut?

If you haven’t seen this yet, prepare to be amazed.  Freshman Ryan Rosenbaum, a defender at Southern Methodist University scores on his very first shot on goal in college soccer.

Reactions in the Watson household:
17-year-old: That was an accident.
13-year-old: Why didn’t the keeper get it?

What say YOUR kids?

Do sports matter in elementary school? Yes, especially if the athletics reaches out beyond the walls of the gym.

Jessica Gottlieb writes about how first impressions can have profound impacts – this time, in regards to choosing a private school for your family. Her brief post  Elementary Sports as Ambassadors can (and should) have headmasters and principals running down to the coaches office throughout the land.

Check it out and see if you agree.

Dear Mrs. Oudin,

Congratulations on Melanie’s fabulous success so far in the U.S. Open! I’m typing this an hour before her next appearance, and I wish her and your family well. This must so exciting for all of you!

Although none of the Watson children have picked up a tennis racquet in at least nine years, I, along with hundreds of soccer moms in the USYS Region III (which encompasses your hometown of Marietta, GA) can relate to your hotel woes.

Seriously. It is so difficult to know for how long to reserve hotels at sudden-death tournaments, and how to buy return airline tickets for such trips. Last December we had a 3:00 p.m. semifinal game, for example, with a 6:00 p.m. hotel cancellation deadline. Our suitcases were all packed and inside our cars–we’d checked-out by noon, of course–but we were poised to return under new reservations once/if we won the game. (Luckily for us, the rates were the same for all of those nights.)

Our game started late (due to overtimes and injuries in preceding games) and it got pretty tense around 5:35 or so – all 14 of us moms were locking the hotel number into our cellphones and getting ready to call and cancel if needed once/if the final shootout didn’t go our way. Needless to say, it was hard to enjoy the game itself under such pressure.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except to say that I feel your pain. We try to minimize distractions and aggravations for our kids when they are competing, especially at high levels, but sometimes you can’t do much about it.

On the bright side, I guess, it’s a terrific problem to have when your advancement exceeds your hotel reservations!!

I read a cute interview with Manya Makoski of the Los Angeles Sol in the new Women’s Professional League.

She discussed her early playing days in the AYSO, how the pressure was less and the kids had fun. So did the moms.

Atticus Hoffman is a 16-year-old soccer player in Boise. He runs a week-long soccer camp for refugee children in his city, which is a “relocation center”. In his third year of operation, he’s done tremendous good in providing a fun experience for children who’ve seen atrocities in their native countries.

One child explained how in his country, they would take heads of lettuce and fill them with clay, and bake them in the sun to form soccer balls!

I’m linking to a story from 2007 about the project, and also to a video news report from this year’s camp which just finished. I was struck by a phrase in the article that proves to any soccer mom that these refugees are just normal kids:

The kids stood outside their apartment complexes at 7:30 a.m. each day, balls in hand, soccer socks on (if not their shoes), waiting for the YMCA bus to pick them up.

2007 Article: Soccer Camp for Refugees

Newscast of Refugee Soccer Camp in Boise

OK, raise your hand if you used to smirk at all those Tide commercials on TV. Clearly that was waaaay before parenting days.

I don’t have a solution for muddy white shorts. I’d say fire the uniform parent, but that creates new problems.

A few weeks ago Holmes came back from a college camp (yes, we acquiesced and sent him to a few) with clothes that were stinky after a full wash. Before drying them, I ran them through the washer again with some soap and a cup of white vinegar. Miraculous! The smell was gone, so now we have a permanent bottle of white vinegar in the laundry room.

Boring but true.

College soccer camp brochures are arriving fast and furious at the Watson household these days. I really think that marketing of these camps may be the salvation of the United States Postal Service!

In the middle school years, teammates  parents of teammates of Sherlock and Holmes bragged about how hard their kids worked at Ralph Lundy Camp, or complained about having to drive to Duke Camp, etc. I smiled sympathetically while smugly calculating how much money they must have spent on these “investments in little Pele’s future soccer career”.

We did spend equal, if not higher, amounts of money-we-did-not-have to let the boys go to sleepaway summer camps. Camps with lakes were preferred, ideally with boating, but at least with the Blob. Ropes courses, nature hikes, backpacking, bike riding, campfires, and some kind of Indian names and secret handshakes were what Mr. Watson and I thought would a nice change from the eleven and a half months of soccer they were used to.

When the boys entered high school, their summers were filled with club soccer tournaments, even Regionals. The high school coach required the whole team to attend an “elite” camp at a college. So we saw no need nor time to attend any other camps.

Now that Holmes, our junior, seriously wants to play college soccer, coaches are strongly encouraging him to attend their camps this summer. One coach even responded to a recent email with a form letter that said, “. . . due to our success, there is higher interest than ever in our program. When you come to our camp we can evaluate you among your peers . . .”

In other words, save your personal best DVDs and local newspaper clippings. Sign up for $495 and let us decide if you should even breathe our air.

Ahhhh, air. Reminds me of Camp Lotsa-Bugs-and-Far-From-Homa.

Mr. Watson was telling me about Doyle’s U-13 game today, and he said, “Ya know, I didn’t say any of my usual stuff to him before the game. But he really played well and seemed to be having a good time out there.”

Wow.  Resisting the urge to point out a possible cause-and-effect, I dug this classic from my files. From Bruce Brownlee,  USSF “C” License, Tophat Soccer Club, Atlanta, it circulated throughout the soccer world ten years ago, but remains valid today.

A lot of soccer parents with good intentions give a 30 minute lecture, covering all the player’s supposed deficiencies and giving playing advice, in the car on the way to each match. The kids arrive far off their optimal mental state, and dreading the critique they are likely to hear, whether they want it or not, on the way home.

Kids who are massaged in this way tend not to play badly, they just tend to not play, possibly to avoid making mistakes.

The easiest way to detect this problem is just to ask the player if it is a problem. Kids are more than willing to share this grief. The easiest way to correct this problem is to speak to the parents, as a group, about your expectations, and to cover this as a routine problem. Many of the parents will recognize themselves if you can present this problem with humor and illustrate the importance of the kids having fun and arriving in a good state of mind.

For best results, parents should memorize and use the following.

Before the Match:
I love you
Good luck
Have fun

After the Match:
I love you
It was great to see you play
What would you like to eat?