Coaching youth sports has taught me many things, but tying shoes remains the top duty.

Were you to ask me what I’m an expert in, I’m not sure I could say journalism, having held only two full-time jobs in it. But I can claim authority in another field where I’ve been hired over 15 times.

Youth coaching.

For about five years, I’ve been coaching youth soccer, hockey and baseball. Getting those positions has been a very competitive process, usually involving the head of the league saying, “Help me out here, no one else volunteered.”

Only the most athletically talented parents qualify for youth coaching since it involves two high-level physical talents.

Making telephone calls and tying shoes.

Except in winter. Then you tie skates.

The phone calls involve great digital dexterity since you often have to make 18 of them a mere hour before practice to cancel due to rain. This brings up the first rule of youth coaching, which is that the harder it’s raining when you make the calls, the more likely the sun will embarrass you by coming out a half-hour later. It has happened to me so often I am now convinced Mother Nature, when bored, gets her kicks making youth coaches look bad.

As for the second skill, any parent need only look at their 8-, 10- and 12-year-olds to see that an odd fashion choice of the current youth generation is to not tie their shoes. I suppose it’s a loose “look” to match the unbelted pants that hang 3 inches below the band of boys’ boxer shorts. This may work most of the week, but it does not work on a soccer field, where I once had a player attempt a shot, only to have the ball skid to the side, and his untied shoe fly into the net. I insisted to the ref that the shoe should count as a goal, but was overruled.

Anyway, as head coach – basically the CEO of the organization – my main function now during games is to look for dragging laces, and tie them.

Actually, there’s one other main function for youth coaches, especially regarding kids under 9 or so. You have to give everyone equal playing time.

Mothers can get over a lot of things, like having their houses destroyed by natural disasters or being forced by bankruptcy to move their family into a homeless shelter. But one thing they will not get over is a coach failing to play their children in a youth sports game.

Once, I was a co-coach for an indoor soccer league. I had to miss a weekend game, and later learned my fellow coach, obsessed with victory against a tough opponent, never once put in four or five kids. These were 7- and 8-year-olds, who had arrived suited-up and eager. Their mothers later expressed their displeasure in a way that caused my co-coach to consider entering the witness protection program.

Youth coaches also have to restrain another basic American impulse, which is to bury the competition. This is not encouraged with teams of younger children. It’s a little known fact that once you become a youth coach, you are sent to a secret location for a monthlong indoctrination workshop, whose sole purpose is to train you to respond to all post-game questions with the following sentence: “It was a tie.”

The only problem with this is that most kids, especially boys, have an entire brain lobe dedicated to keeping score, and they will usually shout, loud enough for the other team to hear, “Tie? We killed ’em 10 to nothing.”

Then there’s the most challenging skill. Minutes before game time, as you attempt to assign positions, the children will surround you like a coercive Third World mob, with 18 knee-high voices shouting, “I wanna be center” – until you have to call in the state police riot squad to break it up with tear gas and pepper spray.

I forgot to mention there’s one other phrase they train you to say during that monthlong intensive workshop:

“Game’s over here.”

You have to say this every two or three minutes, particularly to T-ball outfielders, who have a habit of looking either for cloud formations or four-leaf clovers, as opposed to the fly-ball that just sailed past them.

Finally, as a middle-age coach, you have to restrain the impulse to shout a phrase we as boy athletes used to hear our own male school coaches say to us all the time: “All right girls, enough horseplay.” This, of course, is because youth teams now are often co-ed, something I was ambivalent about until a girl on my little league team proved to be my best pitcher, and I’ve been in favor of it ever since.

Anyway, I encourage you to consider the select fraternity of youth coaching, but be warned you must first prove yourself at the key athletic talents of tying shoes and dialing a telephone. We have strict standards, and if you fail at either of these, you will be disqualified.

If you do get hired, I have one critical piece of wisdom to guide you on your journey:

It was a tie.

Mark Patinkin is a columnist for the Providence Journal.


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