The most important position on the soccer team wasn’t the goalkeeper or midfielder.
It was the Rain Monster.
A deluge drenched the fields behind Jason Lee Middle School on a recent evening. It had the parents, including me, huddled under the tall pine trees nearby.
But the 5-year old girls on the field couldn’t have had more fun. The downpour dissolved any sense of order to the practice.
They took turns being the Rain Monster, who tried to drag anyone nearby into the growing puddles on the field. Everyone was soaked. Everyone was smiling.
In sports, you can always find a scandal or scofflaw to read about. Once in a while, it’s healthy to stop and smell the grass clippings.
For most Clark County residents, youth sports are the closest connections we have to organized athletics. With two daughters playing their first year of soccer, I’m seeing youth sports through a new perspective.
Yes, we’ve all heard stories about overbearing parents or intense coaches playing out their Jim Harbaugh fantasy. But that’s a minority.
There’s a lot to celebrate, especially people like Mike Souder.
Souder is what you’d call a super coach. This fall, he is coaching a football team of 5- to 7-year olds and a youth soccer team.
In the winter, he’ll coach two youth indoor soccer teams and two flag football squads. In spring, it’s more soccer and T-ball.
How many hours a week does Souder, a construction foreman, spend coaching kids around Clark County?
“I’d say it’s a solid forty,” he said. “I start work earlier to make time for it. Plus my wife is very involved. She’s a great team mom.”
Souder used to play and coach with the Clark County Vipers amateur football team, but fell in love with youth sports when he was needed to coach his daughter’s soccer team in a pinch.
“Coaching youth is a lot more enjoyable,” Souder said. “I try to include larger lessons about being dedicated and respectful to others.”
Souder says he is trying to play the influential role coaches had when he was growing up.
“I still talk to some of my high school coaches,” said Souder, 32. “They’ve played a big role in my life. Not just in athletics, but in being a husband and a father.”
According to parents with the East Vancouver Venom Pop Warner Tiny Mites team, ages 5-7, Souder is like a father figure to many players, some of whom come from single-parent families.
He tells the story of Brennan Goldsworthy, who would cry during early season practices and wanted to quit football. Through positive reinforcement, he’s now having fun as the starting tight end on the Tiny Mites.
Youth sports will never have the publicity that high school, college and professional sports do. And that’s how it should be. Instead of recognition, kids should play purely for unvarnished joy and the lifelong lessons youth sports teach.
But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a moment to reflect on the important role those games, and the coaches who teach them, play in the lives of Clark County children.
