- I wanted more time with my 9-year-old son, so I decided to coach his soccer team.
- On paper, it makes sense — we do spend a lot more time in the same place.
- However, I realized that other kids were getting all my patience and attention.
Last year, I signed up to coach my son's soccer team for the most obvious reason a parent ever does anything: to spend more time with my kid.
The math made sense. Two practices and a game every week, all of it with my son, on top of the drives there and back. On paper, coaching was hours of togetherness I'd otherwise never get, especially now that he's 9 — almost 10! — and getting to the age where he doesn't always want to hang out with me.
But after just one season, I realized he was getting the worst version of me.
On the field, I'm not his dad
The thing I didn't account for is that when I'm coaching, I'm not his father. I'm the person running the session.
For that hour and a half, I'm managing a dozen other kids, watching the one who wandered off, encouraging the one about to cry, and keeping the two who won't stop talking from derailing the drill. I'm also managing the parents (and their expectations) on the sideline, feeling them silently judge me and whether their kid is getting enough attention and playing time.
My own son is somewhere in that group, and the uncomfortable truth is that he often gets less of me than the others, not more. I overcorrect so nobody can accuse me of favoritism. I'm hardest on him and expect the most of him because he's my son.
Other kids get the patient version of me
On the pitch, I have a nearly endless reserve of patience for other people's children. A kid misses the same pass five times, and I crouch down, calm and encouraging, and walk him through it again. Not to toot my own horn, but I am (for the most part) a good and patient coach.
Then I get in the car with my son, and the tank is empty.
By the time we're driving home, I've spent every bit of warmth I had on 11 other kids. He asks me something, and I give him a short answer. He replays a moment from the game, and I half listen. The one child I signed up for — and whose opinion is the only one I care about — gets the tired, depleted version of me, while a stranger's kid got the patient one an hour earlier.
Time spent is not attention given
I had assumed that being in the same place counted as being together, but it doesn't. We were on the same field, in the same car, spending the same hours "together," and by the metric I'd set out to improve, the season was a huge success. We spent enormous amounts of time together.
But time in the same room isn't the currency kids run on. Attention is. And attention, I've learned, is finite in a way that time on a calendar isn't. You can log the hours and still show up to the person you love with nothing left to offer.
Deciding about next season
So now I'm deciding whether to coach again next season.
Part of me wants to quit coaching entirely and just be a dad in a folding chair on the sideline, saving my patience for the drive home instead of spending it on the field. That version of me is worse for the team and better for my son, and I'm not sure the tradeoff is wrong.
However, another part of me knows he likes that I'm there. He likes pointing me out to his friends and saying his dad is the coach. And I like to be a positive role model for him. But whatever I'm getting wrong, he likely didn't experience the season as a loss the way I did.
If I do it again, I know the answer isn't more drills or better practices. It's protecting something in reserve, coaching with maybe only 90% of myself, so there's something left in the tank for the kid in the passenger seat.
Because he's the one I signed up for and the only one who truly matters to me.