Wet Hot American Soccer Camp

by Jeffrey Blum

The first thing my boss ever said to me was, “You haven’t killed anyone have you?” This was at the soccer camp where I worked for two summers in college. She was legally required to perform background checks on all of her coaches, but I was a last-minute hire and background checks performed on residents of the state of New York are especially expensive, so she had skipped mine and just asked me jokingly if I had killed anyone instead. If the state inspectors came by I was to avoid talking to them or giving them my name because I was not officially registered as an employee.

I had gone to a college with no NCAA soccer team and a student body of 1400 wan intellectuals. This had on the whole worked out rather well, and I enjoyed playing on our club team, but a part of me still dreamed of having gone and ridden the bench for one of the division III schools that had half-heartedly sent out recruiting feelers while I was in high school (the best description I can give of this club team is that one of the members of the team was a published poet who looked and played sports in exactly the manner you would expect of a published poet. You know how when you picture a young Philip Larkin you picture a strapping young athlete? Exactly). With this in mind, and a dearth of other job options due to poor planning, I had applied to coach at a soccer camp where I had gone as a camper. The coaches were all supposed to play on NCAA or NAIA teams, and by sneaking in I got to pretend I was one of them, a real college player. For the privilege of working with, playing with, and hanging out with real college players I taught small children how to kick with their instep at various one- to two-week camps all over the northeast.

The campers would get in Sunday afternoon and leave Friday morning. The camp was a franchise with locations all over the country, so there was a set curriculum each week. Penalty kicks happened on Wednesdays in Connecticut and in Texas. Dribbling was on Tuesday mornings in Massachusetts and in Virginia. For each new drill we would bring all the campers in and they would sit and watch the coaches give a demonstration. Then we would break off into our own little groups of kids who we were responsible for and do the drills we had just demonstrated. At night the kids would scrimmage.

The work was fun because we were outside playing games, but it was also exhausting. We were all out in the sun all day getting sun burnt and having our eyes redden and sting from the sunscreen and sweat dripping down past our lashes. We ate a lot and exercised a lot (and frequently drank a lot at night to unwind from the day) so we felt mildly sick to our stomachs all the time if we weren’t careful. Kids suffered from those things too, but they also got phantom injuries from having no friends in their group, or from having a coach yell at them for wandering off to pick flowers (to eat them). These injuries manifested themselves as untreatable maladies that required sitting on the sidelines unless their group was doing something really fun.

In addition to the potential ailments facing all campers, young male goalies all got rashes on their balls. The heat, their poor hygiene, and their thick, black, polyester little kid goalie shorts made this inevitable. By day three all the little goalies waddled slowly and gingerly off the field after each session like little ducks — little ducks with inflamed, irritated genital regions. If the pain got bad enough they would ask the trainer for Gold Bond Powder, but since the trainer was female (can’t hire two trainers, better to have a female trainer wrapping guys’ thighs than the other way around), many young goalies, weighing their discomfort against their potential embarrassment, just sucked it up.

One of the camp’s biggest concerns was campers having sex with each other, or doing something that could eventually lead to the campers having sex with each other. We were also concerned about camper foreplay. To prevent this, we warned the campers that the doors to the dorms locked at night so if they went out looking for the girls’ dorm we’d find them locked out in the morning. Or we warned them that if they got caught we would call their parents in the middle of the night and their parents would have to drive and pick them up early and their money wouldn’t be refunded. If we saw two campers being flirty with each other we would wait till the whole camp was gathered somewhere and say something like “Brooke and Connor stay away from each other, we don’t want any camp babies.” Then all the kids would laugh, Brooke would be embarrassed and upset, and Connor would be embarrassed and a little bit pleased with himself, but after that they’d stay away from each other.

The campers got three meals a day, but to make extra money the camp also had a snack bar at night where we sold pizza, candy, and Gatorade. To make the camp snack bar more profitable we fed the kids dinner at five, went out and played until eight, and then made them sit in a room that smelled like pizza and sour straws for two hours. Pizza cost two dollars for a half-slice. Candy was a dollar. Gatorade was two.

In between sessions on the field the coaches would play games. Soccer tennis and soccer horseshoes and soccer golf where anything can be a hole, including other people. When a person is a hole you need to hit them with the soccer ball; we competed with each other at hitting small children with soccer balls.

One night each week we talked about playing soccer in college and coaches shared advice about how to get recruited. The only real piece of advice I remember was a rambling anecdote from Coach Mike about how his big shot college coach brother got a highlight video from a player he was scouting who was a good player but the video was set to rap music with “All kinds of f-bombs in it.” After being subjected to that sort of language Coach Mike’s big shot brother was no longer interested. I guess the lesson here is that setting your highlight tape to rap is a good way to weed out the reactionary bigots among your potential college coaches.

Coach Mike was filled with rambling anecdotes about his big shot brother who coached at some big college. He wouldn’t shut the fuck up about him. He told this story about his brother meeting former U.S. National Team star Brian McBride and Brian McBride had been practicing headers and then later Brian McBride had scored a header. Then he asked, “Isn’t that a great story?” Every story Coach Mike told ended with this rhetorical question.

That week Coach Mike was in charge of all the outfield coaches, but my real boss was Christine, who ran the camp. If you want to see a small, petty, failure of a 50-year-old man seethe, make his immediate superior a 32-year-old woman. Don’t give the woman any special credentials that he doesn’t have either, just make her smarter and better at her job in ways that are immediately, blindingly obvious to everyone but him.

When we were mad at campers for doing something wrong, or when we were bored, we punted soccer balls and made them chase them. Or we made them run up and down a steep hill. Or we sent them all the way across the fields to pick a leaf for us from a tree in the distance and when they got back we told them it was the wrong leaf and made them go again. Or we made kids sing ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ or ballroom dance with each other in front of the other campers. Or we threatened to get them up early and make them run in the morning, but didn’t follow through because we wanted to sleep more than we wanted to punish them.

We collected anecdotes about shitty kids and good kids and weird stuff that happened, to trot out like war stories for each other and especially for the new counselors; it was another way to enforce hierarchy. Look at how long I’ve been here, at all the shit I’ve seen. The kid who went on hunger strike. The kid who blew a counselor. The kid who fell out of a top bunk. The kid who had a bat land on him and started screaming. The kid who started crying when a counselor asked him how he was doing because his parents were getting divorced. The time we hooked up with Kelsey. The time we hooked up with that other counselor whose name I don’t remember but who lead stretches suggestively. The time we lead a group of counselors into the woods on a snipe hunt and we convinced the new counselor to tape his pants to his socks so that when we startled the snipe it wouldn’t run up his pant leg. The coach who got fired for smoking pot. The time we played soccer tennis with that coach who cheats at soccer tennis.

As we got to know each other better through the week of work our topics of conversation would broaden out from just anecdotes about stuff that happened to us or we heard about at soccer camp to stuff we had had happen to us or had heard about in soccer in the world outside of soccer camp. The really good save we made in that game in the snow. The friend of ours who was in a collision that put him in the hospital. The fun drinking games we played with our teammates during preseason. Our time playing for the Barbadian National Team. That comically hapless goalie we played against that one time. The one-year scholarship we got to an NAIA school in Tennessee even though we already had a college degree and had played professionally in Holland. The time we had played against that professional soccer player before he was a professional soccer player and hadn’t thought he was that good. The job we had doing soccer tricks in front of little kids at some sort of state fair. The time we played a game in Mexico City. That teammate we had who shared a lot about his sex life and how we couldn’t believe he let his girlfriend do that to him. How more than one of us happened to know Coach Danilo who lives in New Haven. The friend of ours whose coach would send the whole team on a jog and then rifle through their bags and take money out of their wallets.

That last one was my story. I had met that coach. He was a nice guy, although in retrospect his complaining about the spoiled rich kids on his team took on a different edge when you knew he took their lunch money. Sometimes I joined in on the shit-talking, but other times I just sat back and listened; I knew my place. Once when it was just me and three other junior male staffers drinking in a dorm room we talked about the female campers in ways that would have made their parents unhappy that they were paying us. I think I didn’t chime in, but who is worse, the guy who expounds on how the rising high school sophomore with the side ponytail has ‘blowjob lips,’ or the guy who sits there and listens but says nothing?

The other guy, the other guy is worse, but I’m not blameless here either. I was the one who wanted to hang out with these people, to become one of them and bond over staff games and cans of Coors.

The hardest part of being a counselor was writing the player evaluations that each camper got at the end of the week. On the evaluations you had to grade each camper on a scale of 1–5 for every soccer skill and ability known to man. They were four pages long. One was the best, five was the worst, and you weren’t allowed to give below a three unless you knew the kid had had such a bad time that he wasn’t coming back. A lot of the time you had never seen the kid perform the skill in question so you just made a number up. How good is Kayla at bending the ball with the outside of her foot? A ‘2’?

In addition to the number grades, there were written sections for each category where you had to give comments and advice for the players. “Ben, your placement shooting is good but you should work on your power shooting by practicing striking the ball with your instep, following through, and landing on your kicking foot like we worked on this week at camp.” “Kaitlynn, your defensive heading is good, but your offensive heading could improve if you practiced heading down and striking the ball with your forehead, rather than on top of your head.”

You had to fill these sections completely and they were large and my handwriting was small and we were pressed for time, so I got really good at filling up space with unnecessary clauses and prepositional phrases. Is Luke a fierce competitor? Then he can be a fierce competitor both in practice and in games. Does Bethany have great leadership skills? Maybe she has those skills both on and off the field. Does Dylan have impressive dribbling ability? Well could that dribbling ability be even more impressive when preceded by ‘for such a young player’? Gratuitous adjectives and adverbs were also my friends. Players were tenacious, dogged, determined, rapid, skillful, adept, enthusiastic, and, if it was really late and I was really tired, maybe even mercurial.

We had genuinely good advice for a few kids. Max B. should start lifting weights and work on becoming more aggressive because he is tall and skillful, but a little bit passive. Cassidy plays as a defender now, but given her shooting ability and speed, she could be a great attacking midfielder. Austin should stop wandering off and eating flowers during practice. The rest of the time, though, the evaluations were all basically the same. There was a recurring rumor that some counselors used to write them before the camp started and then put names on them once they found a kid that sort of fit.

The last weeks of camp were always the worst. The kids would be new, but we would be tired and irritable and ready to get the fuck out of there. My first year there, the last week was the week Coach Mike was so rude to a female coach that she just walked off the field and left in the middle of a demonstration. I had to step in and continue showing the campers how to do diving headers as if nothing had happened, as if there was no tension, as if a group of kids hadn’t watched a 50-year-old man berate a 19-year-old woman.

My last week ever working, I think I might have bullied a kid into hurting another camper. I know that sounds bad but hear me out: I was just taking my frustrations with my boss out on a small child. That week I had had a good group of kids, one of the best that I worked with. There was round, pudgy, and infectiously likeable Tyler, Connor, who once came to me to complain that some other camper had gotten his shoes all sweaty and when I suggested that maybe it was his feet that had gotten his shoes all sweaty shrugged and admitted that maybe I had a point, and Jack, who approached each game with a desperate seriousness that belied his age.

Midway through the week our goalie got hurt. We needed a keeper for games and drills, but especially for the contests that campers competed in to advance into camp-wide finals where they could win prizes. We moved an older keeper, Little Shit, down early in the week to work with us, but he didn’t like playing with younger campers. Because Little Shit was terrible and my players were good they scored on him with abandon, even Tyler, whose mom had only convinced him to come to camp by letting him bring a mini fridge for his room. Being worse than younger kids only made playing with younger kids even more embarrassing.

Little Shit complained, and got moved back up, so we made do without a goalie for most stuff. But for the MLS shootout finals, I tried again to get a goalie so that it would be fair and got yelled at by the head goalkeeping coach. I know this is boring and overly intricate but suffice to say I was looking out for the kids I coached, trying to give them the best experience possible. My campers were frustrated because they wanted a goalie for something that meant a lot to them, and having a field player or coach was just not the same.

For the finals, with the whole camp watching, Jack finally got to face a real goalie, the same Little Shit who had been unwilling to play with younger kids earlier in the week. As Little Shit walked up to face Jack, complaining to his friends and with an inappropriate smirk on his face, I think I, frustrated and still humiliated from having been yelled at seconds earlier, might have said something like “stop whining about playing with younger kids, you’re not better than they are.” When Jack, inevitably, skipped by Little Shit, and Little Shit saw his pride and his save pass him by with the whole camp watching, he reached out an arm and snagged Jack’s leg, throwing him to the ground. Jack lay in the grass for a moment screaming as my stomach clenched with guilt and fear. I knew I was the real guilty party. Fortunately, Jack was able to get up, dust himself off, and score on his second attempt, this time wisely not coming close enough that Little Shit could touch him.

I didn’t go back the next year. Instead I spent the next summer writing an essay that never ended up getting finished, and going through elaborate steps to become an SAT tutor for Kaplan only to be told that I could not work for them because I lived in a different city than I went to college in.

It’s been years since I worked at these camps, but I still remember them vividly. I remember my campers and my coworkers, but also an embarrassingly large number of specific moments where I thought I played well in staff games and coaches’ demos. The shot I took that swerved away from the keeper into the top corner while we were playing ‘Power Finesse’; the (two) staff penalty kick contests I won. My winning goals in staff games, especially that delicate chip over an advancing goalkeeper’s right shoulder as the defense closed in. The time I nutmegged the big German coach in a drill and the kids on the sideline oohed and aahed.

And now that I am past this point and everything I want to do would be made easier by a previous internship, assistant’s job, or good writing samples and it is clear that I wasted my college summers pitifully, I have the time I put the ball between a slightly overweight Teutonic has-been’s legs and a bunch of eleven year olds cheered for me. I have the glory of it all: the sun, the tan lines, the shit-talking and the adulation. For a brief moment, I was one of the guys and a big deal to a group of impressionable 11-year-olds. That may not be much, but it is something, and I’ll take it.

Jeffrey Blum is a writer based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in N+1, Mcsweeney’s, and The Pamphlette.

Photo: Steven DePolo

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