A soccer dad details the ride from youth to college: Was it worth it?

What are we doing this for? What might we be doing instead? These are fundamental questions David Murray had asked himself as a soccer dad. And still, he thought he had survived it. He and his wife, Cristie Bosch, had weathered the quirks and intricacies of the youth sports world. “I could say that Scout’s mother and I were swept away with the process—or worse, that we were boiled in it slowly, like frogs,” Murray writes in his new book, “Soccer Dad,” which he describes as a family’s intimate story to understand how to parent our young athletes. “But if we were swept away or boiled slowly, it was not mainly by all the soccer apparatus and parental peer pressure—it was by Scout, and her utterly unwavering devotion to this game. I have mentioned that not once in her whole childhood did she complain for a moment about going to a practice, even when she cried all the way there.” They endured the other parents who shouted to “go after No. 8” because she was “the weak link” and other disparaging remarks at children, the club games that felt more like business operations and the disproportionately opportunistic folks who always thought their kids had a chance for world class glory. He describes it as a Byzantine experience. “As a soccer family, you aren’t chasing a dream as much as you’re dead asleep, smack in the middle of one—an epic dream, where literally anything could happen next,” Murray writes early in the book. “One moment you’re back in college and your teeth are falling out, then suddenly you’re on a pirate ship with your wife, when you sail up alongside a lost train wreck in the middle of the woods. When you wake up, you can remember all the rational reactions you’d had to these developments, and what’s funny about a dream is that all those sane thoughts didn’t do you much good, in an insane situation.” Scout, their daughter, rose to a Division 1 school to play her favorite sport but then, her parents realized, the drama really began. Murray had intended to document her career as kind of a “how to” guide for parents, albeit clumsily, he says, to raise a kid to D-1. But instead, it became a journal of revisiting his emotions of how they felt about everything from the time Scout was a young player. “It really becomes a psychological struggle for me to separate my desires for her, for her desires for herself, and to back away and calm down,” he says, “and there's a lot to it. It took everything I had.” He emerges with counsel for all sports parents for kids from pee wee through college. He shared it with USA TODAY Sports for Father’s Day: Go into sports with the idea it might become one of the most challenging parts of your parenting Murray describes himself and his wife as having one striking similarity about their sports backgrounds: Not a lick of soccer experience. He says he wasn’t extraordinary, really, at anything athletic. And yet they found themselves with a daughter, Scout, who loved the Beautiful Game, as he writes. They were urban dwellers from Chicago who, as she achieved more expertise in kicking to teammates and into the corner of goals, traveled out to suburbs to play and, like us, then even further and further away. There is always another level, in every sport. It’s something even gold-medal-winning Olympic swimmer Tom Dolan realizes when his kids do the same sport. “You’ve got summer leagues … and guess what? That’s like, where the grass grows,” Dolan told ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt in a 2023 podcast. “That’s how low that is. Then you’ve got regionals above that, then you’ve got year-round teams. “You’ve gotta go for another hour of laying that out until you get to the national view. And you’ve got every country that runs it that way. And so, my point is that, boy, it’s easy to say, ‘Hey that kid looks like they’ve got something,’ right? Man, you have no idea where that’s gonna go. And so I think the challenge there is to say, ‘All it needs to do is go for today’ and have that view of like, ‘Hey, just get better today.’" Another realization Murray had himself is that, as parents, we can’t allow ourselves to get too wrapped up in goals, results or playing time, even if our kids play Division 1 sports. Rest assured, it took him until late in Scout’s college career to figure out that part. “I would have taken this more seriously had I known it was going to be one of the hardest parts of being a parent,” he says. “I thought the hard parts of being a parent were getting your kid through school. Maybe you were going to have to tutor your kid in some areas that they had struggles, getting your kid through relationships. I was prepared to work hard at that. I thought this was gonna be the easy part. And it turned out in a lot of ways, this was the hardest part.” Here is how you get started. There are two types of soccer dads: Realize you can fall into the trap of being that one. And you can catch yourself. Murray was always into sports, but he fancied himself as trying to be a laid-back sports dad. As he got going with Scout’s career, he came to identify two types of sports dads. There's the type A one (aka “the soccer dad shark”) who's always trying to get every advantage for their kid, he says, always looking for a “better” travel team. And there's the one who says, well, if my kid's talented enough, it'll all work out (aka “the laissez-fair soccer dad”). Murray says he was proud of the emotional detachment he had carefully cultivated. Then came the game when in his scorn for what an eight-year-old teammate and goalie did (or didn’t do, really) produced “the soft child abuse of unrealistic parental expectations.” When she allowed a ball to trickle into the goal during a tight game, Murray found the eyes of another dad who shared his ire. If you have been a sports parent, you have probably felt that urge to do something like this. It’s OK, and actually therapeutic, to admit it. It’s also a reminder of how easily we can lose our bearings. “I realized I'd lost my perspective entirely,” he says. It would occur periodically throughout Scout’s career, continuing to when she played in the Mid-American Conference (MAC) on ESPN+, and Murray would sit, three states away, kicking his feet or even throwing his chopsticks at the TV. If you are in person, tell yourself before the game starts, and throughout it, that the other kid’s parents might be right next to you, or certainly within earshot, if you decide to react. Go into travel sports with this perspective Murray recalls he didn’t want Scout to do ballet as a young girl. “I'd seen that it was too intense,” he says. “Too many rehearsals, injuries, eating disorders, danger. It just took up too much oxygen in anybody's childhood. And so I totally avoided her getting into ballet. And then I introduced her to soccer in a moment when travel soccer basically is the same, all the same dangers.” And yet, Murray says he had another instance where he realized he needed to know more about this world and figure it out, and that Scout wasn't where she needed to be. He had avoided the especially intense world of ECNL (Elite Club National League) soccer until she was in high school, giving her the freedom to play with her friends. Scout would eventually reach a point where she realized: “I’m not good enough.” “That was awful but when she got to college, her enthusiasm for soccer was totally intact,” Murray says. “A lot of her teammates were like burned out hulks by then. And, you know, one of them just talked about wanting to quit all the time and Scout still loved soccer but she'd only been through a year and a half of that crazy (ECNL) grind. She had confidence problems all through college. Would have playing in ECNL for three years helped with that? Don't know, but it is what it is.” Toward the end of a grueling summer of ID camps in front of college coaches after her junior year of high school, Scout got a call from the head coach at the very first one she attended: Ohio University. You only have to hear from one, and if your child has the passion to pursue the sport at that school, he or she will. This point is where Murray’s “laissez faire” Dad instinct kicks in: If your son or daughter is good enough, they will make it. The journey to get there is important, too. For example, Murray had let Scout “play up” with other kids at an early age. To keep her emotions intact, he wishes he wouldn’t have. The older kids seemed to have no interest in talking to her. “At age ten or eleven or twelve, a year or two makes a big difference,” he writes. “And while your kid might get along fine with a neighbor or a cousin one or two years older, a group of kids one or two years older might as well be a group of adults.” 'I'm in soccer jail': Be careful what you wish for and be confident in what you're building When she arrived at Ohio U, Scout soon learned that “you're flicking off classes like they're a pain in the ass,” in her father’s words. She began to fall behind as she devoted herself to soccer, although ultimately had a strong GPA, her father says. There was more sacrifice along the way. For one, she missed a Halloween party where kids come in from other schools in Ohio, but it was held during the MAC season. “She would literally be crying because everybody in the dorm was partying and she would say, ‘I'm in soccer jail,’ ” Murray says. There was more anguish, such as a junior season when she got off to a strong start but had a drop in confidence, then an injury that caused her to lose her starting position. There was constant conversation via Facetime and text with her parents. “I’m tired of having to have a thick skin,” she told them at one point, referring to constant yelling from coaches and teammates. They encouraged Scout to initiate conversations with her college coaches, which benefited her. So did her parents muting themselves with coaches, as they tried to always do. Murray came to another realization with the help of another Ohio U soccer parent. “He told me I was right: Our daughters are strong young women who can handle themselves and don’t need our emotional protection, only our emotional companionship. I told him I appreciated his expression. And I admitted to him that I must repeat these thoughts to myself, too, in an almost daily meditation.” Scout played four years at Ohio U and is now setting off to get her master's degree in psychological counseling. Here’s another meditation for you: We can always remember that anyone, including our kid, can be the one who is traumatized through all of this. And that being the parent can be self-traumatizing. We always talk to our kids about learning failure, but adults can, too. Forgive yourself and move on. It’s never too late. “If you're going to devote so much time to sports, sports has to end in a way that it serves as a foundation for the rest of their lives,” he says. “And how do you play your last season when you know it's your last season? And how do you go through it in such a way that it just doesn't end in this bitter way that like causes you to go, ‘What was that all about?’ We really were super conscious about all that and I think we achieved it.” Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here. Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com