5ApprenticeshipFake It Till You Make It
The first soccer team I ever played on was at age five, in a Jewish soccer league named after the famous warriors in the Hanukkah story. They combined the boys and girls on the same team, and my Israeli coach, Chaim, spent the games muttering expletives under his breath in Hebrew and keeping all the girls on the bench.
While boys and girls eventually develop differently as athletes, at age five they are functionally the same. No one is very strong, very coordinated, or knows what the hell they are doing. The style of play resembles a swarm of honeybees chasing a sugar cube.
That being said, I was good. Very good. Like, didn’t always swarm the ball kind of good. Neither of my parents knew anything about soccer, but I had asked them if I could be on a team because I had picked up playing soccer against the boys on the schoolyard in kindergarten and was running circles around them.
The sidelines of the Jewish soccer league were packed with a smattering of different kinds of anxious people—mothers wringing their hands calling out for their sons to be careful, and fathers desperately wanting their sons to be the best and punctuating their incessant pacing with cries of encouragement. “You’ve got this Yoni—get it to the goal!”
Chaim’s eyes would dart across the field while he yelled instructions to the boys. “Spread out,” he would cry. “Pass it to Levi!” ...
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