Soccer Dad: A Father, a Son, and a Magic Season

A splendid elegy to a season of growth for a father and a son,and a magnificent tribute to a shaper of young men, the magnificent Coach Grabill.

My husband and I could relate to this book on many levels. Our children are much younger than his son but, as this author retells stories of his boy growing up in soccer and his passion for the sport, we could have inserted ourselves into the pages of this book. Wetherell's casual style of writing was enjoyable, although at times it seemed a bit wordy and off topic (a few small tangents I could have done without). Overall, it was an enjoyable read. I chuckled out loud more than a few times and even shed a tear when I could relate so personally. Wetherell draws you into his family and into himself in such a way that any sports parent could relate.

This is a must read for any soccer Dad or Mom. It goes through all the trials and tribulations of being a soccer parent in a humorous way. There are also many interesting observations about the sport of soccer. It would also be good read for many parents that have endured long seasons as a baseball, football, or basketball dad or mom - the impact on the parents is the same. The story is well written and I found it a quick and enjoyable read.

If you're a fan of WD Wetherell's baroquely funny and imaginative novels, you may enjoy this book, though I must say his anarchic invention has been severely tamped--for valid reasons, since he has committed himself to a difficult task, an extended work of nonfiction centering on his son's struggle to win the state championship in a fiercely competitive soccer environment. There aren't many parts of America in which US football takes a backseat to the traditional "beautiful game," but apparently where the Wetherells live, in New Hampshire, it ranks as #1. Each couple of pages in the book you get another mini-essay about different aspects of soccer, and some of these work and some don't. He describes the sounds of soccer in minute detail, and this is a great piece, the sounds a fan will hear on an autumn afternoon, the way the earth rumbles as though a horde of buffalo were stampeding across it, and then he marks down, as though in dance notation, the short interjections and exhortations the individual players make. (Wetherell notes that, compared to most sports, soccer players are talky, something I never thought about before.) The boys on the team each have something to prove, espevcially in the face of a devastasting cheating scandal that had drowned the high school in bad press during the opening of the championship season--a scandal involving football players, the sons of the most prominent town residents, linking their brains together for a Topkapi-style heist of exams. Though no soccer players were directly involved, Wetherell shows how the boys were made vulnerable to the hooting and jeering of their opponents from neighboring high schools, eager to associate the innocent with the disgrace of their schoolmates. Wetherell has his heroes, and they are legion--just about anybody who ever played soccer, and he loves his son's coach, the redoubtable Scot Rob Grabill, "Hanover High's charismatic head coach." Wetherell tries to be objective in outlining the weaknesses and strengths of the boys on his son's team, but one will smile at the way that Matt, his son, escapes any criticism whatsoever. It's clear that for this soccer dad, the sun shines out of Matt's cleats, and while that's the way it should be, it becomes difficult to make any sense out of Matt as a character. He's an angel, and a great athlete, and the apple of Walter's eye, but he's not really a human being here. I kept wondering when a real boy would break out of the gilded skin his father's prose encases him in. We find out that, although he's now a senior, Matt hasn't been to a party in four years, for there might be drugs or drinking there, and that would be bad. I won't spoil the suspense of whether or not charismatic Rob Grabill whips his team into the "threepeat" they're all hot for, but I should mention that at the end, a terrible tragedy occurs to one of main characters--an inexplicable, Richard Yateslike dimunition of power. That part was more like one of Weth