For soccer dads, life is like a box of timbits!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/03/2006 (7226 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’M afraid my life is starting to resemble one of those tear-jerker commercials for Tim Hortons.

This is because much of it now seems to revolve around doughnuts — Mmmmm, doughnuts! — and triple-hanky moments at local sporting complexes.

This became apparent Tuesday night as my wife, my daughter and I made our way into a jam-packed community centre in the hinterlands of North Kildonan.

We were there because my daughter’s River Heights team was battling it out in the final game of the hotly contested indoor soccer championship for 16-year-old girls.

As we picked our way carefully through the ice-covered parking lot outside Gateway Recreation Centre, it seemed like the perfect time to dispense a few of my favorite Fatherly Sports Cliches.

“OK, sweetheart, you gotta fire those girls up!” I advised my daughter.

“Shut up, dad,” she replied, rolling her eyes.

“Seriously, you gotta make sure they all came to play,” I added.

“Please shut up, dad,” she begged.

Oh yeah, she had her game face on. There’s nothing like a little father-daughter bonding before The Big Game.

How important was this contest? Important enough to miss back-to-back episodes of The Gilmore Girls, if you can imagine that.

Inside, it didn’t take long for the excitement to hit fever pitch. One of the soccer moms doled out little sparkly pompoms with pink handles, which we were instructed to shake madly at key moments.

“GO TEAM GO!!!!” my wife screamed in my ear.

“Rah!” I replied.

A few minutes before game time, the River Heights coach came out to check on the parents.

“How’s my daughter doing?” one of the moms asked.

Furrowing his brow, he replied: “I’m just glad her water isn’t carbonated because she’s shaking so much.”

The parents weren’t doing much better. Some of the soccer dads — we’ll call them “Good Dads” — began working off nervous energy by videotaping anything that appeared to be moving in the arena.

The “Bad Dads” — we’ll call them me — suddenly remembered they had forgotten their cameras at home and were forced to do quick sketches in their $1.20 reporter’s notebooks.

My soccer-loving sister-in-law, meanwhile, feverishly knitted little multicoloured sweaters for her dogs. Can’t you feel the tension?

The first half was a blur, filled with more excitement than any of the hockey games at the Winter Olympics. I mean the men’s games, of course.

With a few minutes left in the first half and our team down 1-0, there was a compelling moment of high drama.

A group of teens cheering for the other team invaded our side of the bleachers and began rattling a noisemaker — a big jug full of pennies.

They rattled their jug. We shook our pompoms. Back and forth it went until, apparently in awe of our team spirit, the teens wandered away.

At halftime, the players squatted on the field and slurped ice-cold water. In the stands, parents battled anxiety by gulping double-doubles (see, I told you) and gobbling nachos. Hey, they don’t serve fruit plates.

This may sound hard to believe, but the second half was even more exciting, especially because at one point, with the score tied, my daughter got the ball at midfield.

“SHOOOOOOOOOT!!!!” my wife bellowed in my ear, which I’m pretty sure is still bleeding.

“What?” she said, frowning at me. “She can score from there!”

I should point out here that my daughter has warned me NEVER to yell her name at games because this would give other people the impression that I actually know her and, of course, that would be, like, embarrassing.

If the first half was a blur, the second was a wild frenzy featuring more screaming than a Hilary Duff concert packed with leather-lunged pre-teens. Every shot was greeted by an “OOOOOOOH,” while every save drew an impressive “AAAAAAAAH!” The place was seriously rocking.

Anyway, despite some hard-core parental pompom shaking, our girls lost 2-1 to an inspired group of kids from Selkirk, East Selkirk and St. Andrew’s — the dreaded Tri- S.

In the end, the players were exhausted and the parents had sweated off enough weight to justify the purchase of several large boxes of timbits.

“How you doing?” I asked my daughter as she shoved her second-place trophy into one of her soccer shoes.

“Not bad,” she smiled. “Practices for outdoor season begin next week.”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca