THAT's The Spirit (Spirits!)

I refereed five soccer matches this weekend, and a couple of those games got out of hand; they were played on a slippery grass field, and the home team, mainly Portuguese and Hispanic kids from the South River club, were much more experienced on this surface than the white kids from down the shore; when one team crushes another in youth soccer, it's always a disaster, even though there are rules in place—you're not supposed to beat a team by more than six goals, but then once you are ahead by six goals, you have to do something-- playing possession is demeaning, scoring more goals is unsportsmanlike, going to the corners and shielding the ball is rather violent, putting kids in random positions ends up being chaotic, and trying to dribble through the entire team leads to fould-- in one game, once the home team was ahead by six, the away team pulled the goalie and let him go up and play striker—but then in the general madness, a couple balls slowly rolled into the empty goal, thus running up the score beyond—and some of the parents got very butt hurt that their team was losing so badly—and then the home team decided maybe they should let the other team score, but that didn't work out either . . . I had to convince one dad to get off the field; he strode a few yards out past the sideline and yelled at his son NOT to shake hands when the game ended—and kids started dribbling too much, leading the opposing team to hack at them . . . it's never fun when it goes down like this, and I gave the young coaches, who I know pretty well—they went to the school I teach at— - some tips on how to rein in the score EARLY when you see a blowout developing (when I coached, once some of my more dominant teams got a three or four-goal lead, I would tell them the only way to score was on a header off a weak-footed cross; that was usually difficult enough to stop them from running up the score, but it also gave them something to practice) but I did hear one dad on the sideline with the RIGHT attitude about his son's team getting slaughtered—after the seventh goal was scored on his team, he asked his wife, "Is there a bar nearby?"