Life Advice, {For Dummies}

Funny enough, the best advice I have ever received came from a man who I wish I never even met. My high school varsity soccer coach, who was also our school’s psychology teacher, was beloved in the classroom for being forthright, funny, and the kind of teacher who kept it real with his students. But on the soccer pitch, he was a straight up asshole.

This was the late 90s and early 2000s, before parents bullied coaches and administrators into submission with incessant complaints about playing time, coaching style, and scholarship prospects for their perfectly average-in-a-good-way children. Before umbrella parents became the most feared and powerful specters of both education and athletics.

If you grew up in this era, you already know: If there had been a war, it would have been a clash of Kids vs. Adults.

And the Adults would have destroyed us, pulling out all the stops. We’d be grounded—no going out, no using the car, landline phone, or AOL—for a week. And that was the minimum sentence. You better have done your chores and talked reeeeeal nicely to Mom if you wanted your two-week punishment to be reduced for good behavior.

I’m setting the context so you understand that my parents, teachers, and coaches would have been on the same side. A united front. My parents loved and valued my teachers. They loved my coaches for how they challenged me to be a better athlete and human at the same time.

But my parents hated my soccer coach before I even knew that I should.

He sat me on the varsity bench for both my sophomore and junior year. If it had been a matter of talent, effort, or attitude, I would have understood it. It would have motivated me to get better, like it did at every level before that. That’s the kind of competitor I always have been.

But I was the fittest and most athletic on the team. I worked my ass off in practice. And while I lacked finesse with the ball on my foot, my speed, instincts, and positioning made me a lockdown defender. I was absolutely good enough, not just to play, but to be a starter anywhere on that back line.

After every loss, my teammates and their parents approached me. “If he would just play you…” they’d say, trailing off and shaking their heads like I didn’t already know. Like I wasn’t already trying to digest the pit in my stomach.

I even confronted him about it once, sophomore year, before the bus ride home after a Friday night game.

I hadn’t gotten a single minute of playing time. I was the only one on the team who hadn’t. So, I sat stewing on the bench, fighting back tears while trying to stay positive and cheer for my teammates. Because that’s the kind of competitor I always have been.

“Did I do something wrong, or—?” I asked, as we walked toward the parking lot. I had always been such a confident kid, but here I was, hedging, assuming that I was the problem, and giving him the upper hand.

I don’t even remember what he said. But I do remember that feeling—the blackout anger that rises from your stomach and out your ears, so you can’t hear or see anything—and redirecting it into an actually mature and productive comment.

“If you’re going to sit me like that again, I would just appreciate it if you told me first.” I don’t know how I managed to stay so composed. Even as I write this, over 20 years later, I’m seething.

But it wasn’t just about playing time. And it wasn’t just me.

There was the time that, as punishment, he made one of my teammates run until she puked in the trash can next to the bleachers where we sat watching her. The time that he left a welt on my senior co-captain when he hit her with a corner flag at pre-season practice while screaming at her “ARE YOU GAINING WEIGHT?” in front of all the girls at tryouts.

He just had this malevolent urge to put us in our place. To assert his dominance. To make us submit.

For those two years, I stayed vocal and encouraging to my teammates during practice and from the bench. I was a good teammate. A good sport. A good soldier. What other choice did I have?

My junior year, before the second round of the New Jersey State Tournament, one of our defenders got injured. In this high stakes game, I’d have never thought it possible, but my coach put me in to start at center back.

I wasn’t shaken or rattled or anxious. I knew I deserved to be on that pitch. I played the full 80 minutes plus two overtimes of lockdown D. That’s the kind of competitor I always have been.

After the game, my teammates and their parents approached me. “If he would have just played you back there all season…” they said, trailing off and shaking their heads like I didn’t already know. Like I wasn’t already feeling so righteous and vindicated. Because when it’s time to ball, your girl’s gonna ball. That’s the kind of competitor I always have been.

My senior year, my team selected me as co-captain. I started every game, as I should have, and helped lead our team to the New Jersey State tournament. I was selected First Team All-Conference. Because that’s the kind of competitor I always have been.

I earned all of that in spite of my coach.

And I don’t reflect on this experience as some great lesson he taught me about believing in yourself or being resilient or working hard. I don’t want to paint over this episode as me, overcoming adversity and being stronger for it. I have learned all those lessons a million times through sports, and trust me, this isn’t the same thing.

This experience made me feel powerless, like nothing I did mattered. I could win every ball, dominate at practice, and I still wouldn’t play.

It made me doubt myself and impacted me far beyond soccer. With my coach being a psychology teacher, I have to wonder whether that was by design.

Which is why it’s so frustrating that he also gave me the best advice I’ve ever received:

“Spend as much time with the people and things that you care about, and as little with the people and things that you don’t.”

Time has made me forget under which context—psychology teacher or psychotic coach—he dropped that advice. Time has made me forget a lot of things. But not the way it felt to be, at best, completely underestimated, and at worst, completely manipulated. I still carry that weight. That chip on my shoulder.

I’m not sure spending four years with that soccer coach is worth the one nugget of advice, no matter how clear, simple, and profound it is. But since I am stuck with those memories and that experience, I’m glad I’m able to take away something of value.

I hope you never have someone in your life like who makes you feel that way. Who makes you question everything you do and are. But mostly, I hope that, if you come across someone like that, you can just take this advice and spend as little time with them as possible.