One August in Paris

A Team, A Dream and a Wee Bit of Parental Angst

A quick note to my faithful subscribers . . . Coffey Grounds had an unplanned intermission this summer, as you no doubt noticed. Thank you for staying with me. We are back at the keyboard, aiming to offer you worthwhile reading material. Thanks again for reading, and if you are enjoying it, please shout it out from the proverbial rooftops.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that Samantha Grace Coffey and I were spending hours in the car together, hundreds of them, driving to soccer practices, games and tournaments. It started when she was five, strapped into her car seat in the back, and continued until she was 17 and the proud owner of a driver’s license. Once she was big enough to sit in the passenger seat, we developed an impromptu ritual. We had quite a few rituals, actually, the sort that take root organically in almost all parent-child relationships. When Sam was little, I’d carry her downstairs in the morning and halfway down, both of us would slap our palms against the wall over the staircase, high-fiving plaster that dates to 1860. Sam loved (and still loves) homemade waffles; whenever I would fire them up, I’d dice them into bit-sized pieces and drizzle them with Maine maple syrup (this is a Log Cabin-free household), continuing to do so long after Sam was fully proficient with a knife and fork.

The ritual in the car, though, that may have been the most special. Our rides were always a highlight of the day for me. They would feature her favorite music, the regular play list including “American Pie” by Don McLean,  “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel, John Fogerty’s “Rock ‘N Roll Girls” and almost anything by John Prine. (Sam’s dear friend, Ally Schlegel, once called her “an old soul;” Ally’s right.) Sam would sing along, on key and with gusto, to every tune. Then, usually when we were getting close to the field, I’d reach out, take her left hand and kiss it. She would take my right hand and kiss it. And that was it. No words were exchanged, and none needed to be. It took about one-tenth of the time it will take you to read this paragraph, but it remains one of my sweetest memories of my life as a parent.

Samantha’s mother, Denise Willi, and I traveled to six of Sam’s games over the past month. I didn’t need to drive her, and while we had plenty of opportunities to give her a hug, there was no hand-kissing. Sam’s soccer is in a different place now – a wonderfully different place. Twenty years after she wore No. 2 for the Hedgehogs, she wears No. 17 on the U.S. Women’s National Team. Those six games played out across 16 days, all over France: Nice, Marseille, Paris, Lyon and Paris again. The competition was the Olympic Games.

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I know a bit about the Olympics, having covered 12 of them as a journalist, both Winter and Summer, starting in 1992. That was six years before Samantha came into the world, joining her siblings, Alexandra and Sean. Working the Games often entailed 16 or 18- hour days, writing stories about one event while riding a bus to the next one. I am absolutely not complaining. There is plenty to be cynical about regarding the Olympics, and the politics and profit motive that drive them, but the stories of the athletes and their quest for greatness, for Olympic glory, still find a way to lift you up, and make you feel as if you are witnessing the best of humanity. Stories like Jesse Owens, a Black man from Cleveland, sprinting and jumping to four gold medals in 1936, making a mockery of Hitler’s master-race nonsense. And Derek Redmond, a British 400-meter runner, who pulled a hamstring muscle halfway through his semifinal heat in the 1992 Games in Barcelona and was so determined to finish the race that he hopped around the track on one leg before his father, Jim, ran on to the track and accompanied his son, arm-in-arm, to the finish line, bathed in a thunderous ovation as they went.

Those were the stories that I loved to write about, and I did, again and again. For three weeks at this summer’s Paris Olympics, though, I did not look for – or write – a single piece. That’s because I was not there as a journalist. I was there as a parent. To say it was surreal is an Eiffel Tower-sized understatement. To say I was in a soccer bubble is even more of an understatement. I was aware of the epic performances of Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky and Steph Curry, of course, but my Olympics, parochial and maybe pathetic as they might be, involved a single sport. The U.S. women played (in order) Zambia, Germany, Australia, Japan, Germany again and Brazil. At some point during every game, Denise and I had a variation of this exchange:

D: Can you believe we are at the Olympics watching our daughter?

W: No, I can’t.

D:  I don’t know when it’s going to sink in.

W: I’m not sure it ever wil

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In her pre-Olympic media interviews, Sam spoke eloquently about what an honor and privilege it was to represent the U.S. in the Games. We felt the same way as her parents. That said, I must tell you that being an Olympic parent is far more nerve-wracking than being an Olympic journalist. As a sportswriter, all I had to do was find good stories and do a serviceable job writing them. As a parent, I spent the better part of three weeks impersonating a raw nerve ending. This isn’t to say I did not have fun, or feel joy. I did. But watching the games stirred up nonstop anxiety. Years ago, I heard an interview in which NFL great Calvin Hill said that he would get more nervous watching his son, Grant, play basketball than he ever did playing in a Super Bowl. Speak to me, Calvin.  You love your kids so much that you literally would lay down your life for them. You want them to be happy and healthy and good-hearted humans, and you want them to pursue their passions and live joyfully. You want that more than anything in this world.  But what you grudgingly learn as a parent is that after you do your best to set your kids on the right path you have little (or no) control over how their lives will unfold. Our oldest daughter, Alex, is (brag alert) an outstanding young sports journalist (where did she cook up that idea?) with the Philadelphia Inquirer whose work has already been featured twice in the annual anthology, The Year’s Best Sports Writing. Our son, Sean (brag alert No. 2) is a gifted, fast-rising TV reporter in Raleigh, N.C., a top 25 market. And Sam, well, she is living her lifelong dream, playing professional soccer and representing her country at the highest level. As blessed as Denise and I feel about our kids’ health and well-being, as much as feel as though we’ve won the kid lottery, we of course know that life comes with no guarantees. Tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us. Stuff happens. There’s no policy you can take out to ensure that your kids’ prosperity will continue.

Which brings me back to my anxiety while watching Olympic soccer games. As proud as I was to hear Sam’s name announced in the starting lineup and see a closeup of her on the Jumbotron, listening to the national anthem with her eyes closed and her hand over her heart, I was acutely aware that I had zero control of how Sam would play or how the U.S. would fare. I wanted desperately for everything to go well for her and her teammates. I wanted every touch to be immaculate, every pass on target, every tackle or clearance to be impeccably timed. I wanted it so much that the anxiety would not abate until the ref would blow the whistle three times to signal the game’s end.

The Olympic schedule is maniacal, with only two days off between games, one of them requiring travel. The players’ days were tightly managed, but typically there would be a window of time or two for us to visit with Sam at the team hotel, or go out for a cup of coffee. The visits were not long, but they were worth gold, pardon the pun. Denise and I followed a single, iron-clad rule: no talk about soccer. Questions about training, analysis of games, musings about strategy or lineups – we weren’t going anywhere near any of that. Emma Hayes and her staff proved quite capable of handling things without our input. Besides, what Sam wanted was a diversion . . . a respite from the intensity of what she was experiencing. So we showed her photos of our cats, joked about her brother’s propensity to annoy her (lovingly) and talked about things in the neighborhood back home in Sleepy Hollow. I told a few Dad jokes, including one pilfered from fellow soccer dad, Sean Linnehan (father of the Thorns’ Payton): “Did you hear about the explosion in the French cheese factory? De brie was everywhere.”  One day in Lyon, we even went shopping for a white Scrunchie – Sam’s trademark ponytail accessory. Her regular Scrunchie went missing amid piles of USWNT laundry. We found a Claire’s not far from the main square in Lyon. Claire’s is Scrunchie Central.  A crisis was averted.

The hardest of the six games for Sam was the only one she didn’t play in: the quarterfinal against Japan in Parc des Princes in Paris. Three minutes into the last group stage game in Marseille, Sam was whistled for a foul and given a yellow card. (It was not just harsh, it was ridiculous. And as you know, I am thoroughly impartial.) Because she had picked up a yellow in a previous game, it meant she had to sit out the first knockout stage game. They wouldn’t even let Sam be with the team on the bench; she was up in the stands, in a Plexiglas setup that looked like a penalty box, accompanied by a security person, just to make sure she didn’t run on the field, I guess. The U.S. needed extra time to escape Japan, thanks to a wonder goal by Trinity Rodman.

“Those were the longest 120 minutes of my life,” Sam said. They weren’t much different for me, because if the Olympics had ended there for the U.S., with their starting defensive midfielder in the penalty box, she would’ve felt it was her fault. That wouldn’t have been true, but that’s who Sam has always been, fiercely loyal to her teammates, always ready to hold herself accountable, sometimes to an unreasonable extent.

Sam was back for the semifinal against Germany, another taut affair that took 120 minutes and an all-world save by Alyssa Naeher in the 119^th minute that made Sophia Smith’s extra-time goal stand up.

So now it was on to the gold-medal game, against Brazil. The U.S., almost nobody’s choice to win these Olympics, had played five games and won them all. Our daughter had played every minute of the games she was eligible for, and what was most striking to me from the outset was that Sam seemed utterly herself, playing with the same joy and passion she has always played with, all the way back to the Hedgehog days. Not only was she not overwhelmed by playing the final before 50,000 people in the stands and nine million television viewers, she seemed to be reveling in the moment, unfazed by what was at stake. How athletes, in any sport, are able to do this is unfathomable to me. Maybe it comes with being a professional, training your mind and body so long and so hard that you are free to go out and just play. I don’t know.

The most mind-blowing moment for me came when Sam was going up against one of her childhood heroes, Marta, in the midfield. Six-time world player of the year, 38-year-old Marta came on in the 61^st minute, to a rousing ovation. How could I not think back to the time Sam, age 11, met and interviewed Marta for a kids’ magazine published by Scholastic. Denise worked at Scholastic at the time. The company had a program called Kid Reporters for aspiring young journalists. Alexandra and Sean both did it, and Sam followed suit, so there she was, tape recorder in hand, awe carefully concealed, asking the greatest player in the sport a few questions at Rutgers’ Yurcak Field. Denise, who lived in Brazil as a kid and is fluent in Portuguese, did the translating.

“What do you think is the key to your success?” Sam asked Marta.

“Practice, practice, practice,’ Marta said. “There is always something you can learn. You have to work to your maximum to be your best.” Then Sam asked how she stayed motivated when she was\ already on top

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 “The motivation comes from the obstacles one has to overcome in life. We all have obstacles. The feeling of satisfaction comes by overcoming something,” Marta said, before talking about the importance of communication and building mutual respect with your teammates, and not letting yourself be satisfied.

“I never feel like I know it all,” Marta said. ‘To reach my potential, I’m always looking to be the best I can be.”

  Sam took Marta’s words to heart. She has had a number of obstacles in her way over the years. She was largely overlooked by the U.S. Soccer developmental system. She was never a highly ranked youth player, for whatever those rankings are worth (not much). She was never on a powerhouse club that commanded attention from college recruiters, and attracted little interest from the top college showcases she attended. Last summer she was one of the final cuts from the World Cup roster. She refused to let any of that define her. She kept loving the game, and kept working to get better, heeding the counsel of Erica Dambach, the exemplary coach of Penn State, who talks a lot about the “growth mindset.” Sam’s whole trajectory changed in her three years at Penn State. She was an All-American midfielder who hungered to improve. There was no such thing as an offseason.

Many players lose their love of the sport over the years, because of pressure and expectations and the toxicity that still seems all too prevalent in certain quarters of the women’s game. That has never happened to Sam. In her life, soccer equals joy, in an almost indescribable way, and it was there to see after the three whistles sounded and the U.S. had won its first gold medal in 12 years, Sam running deliriously through the midfield, arms spread wide, smile even wider, all of it captured on TV. She hugged teammates and coaches and the training staff that helped keep her body in one piece, and soon the tears started, and when she got to where we were sitting, near the corner flag with the other U.S. families, the tears came even harder. We hugged and reveled in her happiness and told her how proud we were of her, even though that was impossible to convey, knowing how many years of training went into it. Alexandra and Sean, seated in a different section, both of whom flew back to France for the Olympic final after being there for the group stage, found a way to get her attention, and that brought more tears, and a three-sibling hug.

“What just happened?” Sam said to her big sister and brother.

There wasn’t an answer. And there didn’t need to be.

Yes, I covered those 12 Olympics as a journalist. I saw Usain Bolt win the 100 meters in a world-record time in Beijing in 2008, and Jimmy Shea win the gold in skeleton with the funeral card of his late grandfather in his helmet six years earlier. I saw Michael Phelps crush the competition in the pool again and again, and Katie Thomas do the same in gymnastics. None of that could compare to the experience I had as an Olympic parent, watching Samantha Grace Coffey and her 21 teammates win gold. Next time I see her I might just kiss her hand.