You know you are a Soccer Coach When...

1. Someone asks you how much time a week you spend on soccer activities, and you can hear you wife involuntarily/audibly suck in her breath and you think "I suppose I could be doing more..." 

2. You pray to win the lottery so you could build a first rate soccer facility. 

3. As a single Dad you go to your closet to find something for a date to wear and all you have are shorts and T-shirts. 

4. When your kids break a lamp they have to dribble around the field 50 times. 

5. During the Elections you write in Lallis.

6. Your neighbors call 911 because you haven't left your house day or night during world cup. 

7. You walk through the grocery store and some kid in every part of the store says "hey coach!" 

8. You try to put your groceries in the trunk and it is filled with your soccer gear. 

9. When you belong to this soccer list. 

10. All non work clothing has three stripes or an Diadora brand name. 

11. Thinks about set pieces during dull meetings.

12. Dog's name is Toe-Ball. 

13. Main factor in buying a car is whether or not the portable goal will fit.

14. Don't understand why the referee whistled the foul in basketball, when the opponent had a clear breakaway. 

15. Local soccer retail store gives you a team discount for all personal purchases.

16. Has all 52 games of each of the last two World Cups on tape.

17. Thinks that ice is the answer to all injuries. 

18. Recognizes ex-players by the way they run.

19. Doesn't even like to watch that other "football" anymore. 

20. Talk the game with your wife, who is ignoring you like you weren’t there.  Good part is you don't even care. 

21. You become a high school ref, as a means to recruit High School players for your travel team.

22. You watch your best friends soccer team play, and think I could have done a better job with them. 

23. When you are on the phone talking to soccer people, and your children complain they never get the chance to use the phone. 

24. You call in sick from work, but you could be dying but never miss a game. 

25. Love to watch games featuring your former players, and tell complete strangers you taught him how to make that perfect cross that player just executed. 

26. Talk to another coach knocking another coaches best player. Then say to yourself "I wish I had him." 

27. After your team played their game at home, you stay to see the next 3 games. 

28. Play an away game on Saturday. Get home and realize you left your player passes at their field. Sunday morning you have a State Cup game. Call the opponents coach to ask him if he found the passes, he said no. So go to the field 20 miles away at midnight with a flash Light and walk the field. No luck so now you are talking to yourself. Then you call opponents coach again, the opponents coach is rather annoyed. Your team beat his team and now you are keeping him awake. You ask for his assistants number. You wake up his assistant who thankfully says he found the player passes. You go and pick them up. Then you think about your next game. 

29. Your will states your ashes should be spread over your home field. 

30. When you go on a family vacation and you still have soccer equipment in the trunk. 

31. You carry an extra whistle in your suit when you go to work, just in case.

32. You take a soccer ball to the restaurant so you and your daughter can practice juggling in the parking lot until your table is ready.

33. You ask the hotel reservation clerk about grassy areas in the vicinity of the hotel, before you ask about an indoor pool or the proximity to tourist attractions. 

34. You write lineups and formations on napkins in restaurants. 

35. You wake up in the middle of the night and scribble notes about a 3v1 possession drill that ends in a left-footed shot on goal. (First, no keeper, then a keeper.) 

36. You get a flat tire and then remember you took out the spare to make room for the bag of pennies and practice nets. 

37. You have to tell your passengers to be careful when climbing over the corner flags when they enter your car. 

38. You take your VCR to work and watch coaching videos in your office, with the door closed, while you eat your lunch. 

39. You take your soccer books to girl scout functions or dance and piano recitals, then have frequent stomach problems necessitating repeated trips to the bathroom. 

40. You kiss your spouse good night and say, "Well done or good work." 

41. You get on your wife for such a large credit card bill when you realize that you spent: $450 for a Coerver goal so you could practice your 3v3 team in your back yard, $140 for soccer balls so every kid at practice would have one $100 for soccer videos so you could figure out the difference between a stepover turn and a Rivilino, $50 for little soccer patches that you give out for great plays, and you didn't even tell her about the $150 you threw in on the indoor fee so some kids could afford to play indoor or the $100 you paid for indoor practice time or ........

42. You have to cull your t-shirts once a year so they will fit in the drawer alloted to them separate from the shorts. 

43. You consider it a good day when you spend 10 hours driving to see an 8-0 NCAA tourney game. 

44. Your non soccer friends give you an autographed soccer ball as a 50th birthday present, with their signatures on it, to join your collection. 

45. You use an elevator foot trap to stop a basketball going out of bounds and flick it back to the ref with a nifty chip at your daughters Jr. Hi game. 

46. You spend 5 hours on a Sunday organizing "Gary Rue" posts for a youth coaches handout. 

47. You talk to another coach about Gary, Dan, Bruce, Connie, and others and you both know who you are talking about by the first names. 

48. Your non soccer playing son without asking schedules his wedding for a time in between your fall and indoor seasons. 

49. You vacation is a soccer tournament or coaches clinic out of state. 

50. You choose your car color based on your club or school colors. 

51. You can spell Meotis Erikson correctly without looking. 

52. When you have two desks in your office at work, one for your "real job", and one for soccer coaching. (The soccer desk is the largest and most prominent.) 

53. You have more pictures of your soccer teams on your walls than you do of your family.

54. At least 10% of your family budget goes for soccer. 

55. You are involved in no less than three soccer teams and have no one in your family who plays on them. 

56. You will drive forty miles one way in a car that you are not sure will last 25 miles to watch two bottom of the league college teams play and stay until after dark watching youth league teams play. (Engine blows three days later on the way to work. Who cares? It wasn't a soccer game I had to miss!) 

57. You always have to drive alone because all of the car seats are filled with soccer gear and the hatchback is tied down to keep the soccer balls from bouncing out.

58. When you ride your bicycle across the state the first thing you pack is a soccer ball and shoes. 

59. After a hundred mile bike ride you will ride ten more to find a soccer field or at least a good place to play. 

60. Your life seems empty when you aren't on the field every night, so you take up refereeing on the nights left over. 

61. Your family goes to the soccer fields first when they want to talk to you and must stand between you and the field to make eye contact. 

62. All kids within a radius of 4 miles know that you are the only one who owns a Mikasa air pump. 

63. A whistle is permanently wrapped around your drivers side sun-shade. 

64. You store goal net anchors at the bottom of your wheel well. 

65. You wear a tracksuit to church.

66. You address the preacher as "ref". 

67. You leave church at half-time. 

68. TV soccer schedules are automatically communicated to you by non-believers (I.E. followers of other religions - I mean sports). 

69. Corollary to previous - the only reason to subscribe to TV Guide is to find out what soccer games will be broadcast this week on what cable channels. 

70. Your personal phonebook/address list is clogged up with soccer weirdoes. 

71. At any idle moment you instinctively tune in to soccer-coach-l 

72. You scream "Penalty ref" at precisely 4.34 am. 

73. You get withdrawal symptoms when the season ends. 

74. You and your seatmate on an airline flight (or some business contact you just met, etc) are chit-chatting, and the conversation strikes a nice chord when it turns out both of you coach youth teams, you soccer and he the "other" football (it's inevitably a red-blooded "he" for the "other" football, never a mom). The musical kinship created by this conversational "chord" fades rather quickly as he describes the exploits of his team's season game-by game, with the enthusiasm of a lively salsa band but all you hear is mantovani elevator music, putting you to sleep despite your best efforts to stay interested. However, your interest is revived when conversation turns to problems he is having teaching some kid a particular skill or tactic at a particular age, and your conversation makes happy music together for another half hour on a common chord, and he actually understands about what *you* are talking about when you relate it to a problem you are having teaching soccer to similar-age kids (has no clue, however *what* it is you are trying to teach them ;=) 

75. You dread the possibility that your airplane seatmate may start 

76. Talking about the possible super-bowl matchups, and even more that they may try to strike up a conversation around last week's/next week's Cowboys-49rs game. When it turns out instead your seatmate is a former college soccer player, you happily talk for an hour. 

77. You spend more time reading list e-mail than career related e-mail 

78. You have more pairs of sparkling clean soccer shoes than "normal" shoes. 

79. You purchase soccer gear (for yourself) and end up donating it to the team.

80. You purchase soccer-related Christmas gifts for you non-soccer playing loved ones. 

81. Every girl you know under age 18 is a soccer player. 

82. When a player on one of your teams asks about a pro player or pro team, you tell them you will pull a tape out of your library (140+). 

83. You spend hours on the internet trying to figure out how to fly to Europe or Brazil to watch one of your favorite teams play. 

84. You donate more money to your HS team than the Soccer Boosters do. 

85. You choose to stay in town over the Christmas holidays and run a free soccer clinic rather than go home and see your parents. 

86. You decide to purchase a new vehicle "BIG ENOUGH FOR YOUR SOCCER GEAR"! 

87. Got a doctorate, so you took a job working part-time in the league soccer office, which you like better than biology anyway. 

88. Two kids play, and you coach one, but you are tired of doing that, so you thought you'd coach a third team while both kids play for some one else. 

89. You bought a new house that needs some work, so one of the first things you do is spend too much money turning the RV barn into an indoor soccer complex. 

90. Dog named Xara 

91. Cat named Mikasa and kittens should be called "Inflate to 9 pounds" and "Nylon wound". 

92. Your husband and kids go out of town for a weekend and you spend the entire "alone weekend" at a soccer tournament. 

93. The only reason you have cable TV is to watch soccer 

94. You take the C clinic in Florida instead of your home town because you think you'll have more time to study if you are away from home. 

95. You can't trade in the old truck because new trucks big enough to fit your goal are too costly. 

96. You can't think of anything else, because you've read everyone elses posts, and they took a couple of the really good ones! (not to mention copying a couple anyway). 

97. Lose sleep worrying about whether the lineup for tomorrow's game is fair to every kid. 

98. Remind yourself before each game to secure the virtual duct tape firmly over your mouth.      

99. Kick yourself when the duct tape slipped off and you said something you shouldn't have. 

100. Spend the last hour of work planning today's practice session. 

101. Read every soccer catalog that comes in the mail cover to cover. 

102. Wonder why your players can't do most of the things described by other coaches on the list. 

103. Look at the snow-covered soccer fields every time you drive past them in winter, just in case… 

104. Tell yourself, when your team is losing 5-0 and hasn't had the ball over the midfield line, that you are really more concerned with player development, that the players will learn from this, and that the other coach is just interested in winning anyway. 

105. Tell yourself, when your team is winning 5-0 and the other team hasn't had the ball over the midfield line, that all that player development is paying off. 

106. Wonder just what your friend meant when he asked whether you had considered getting a life. 

107. Organized a call-in campaign to get your cable company to carry ESPN2 

108. Lie about how much time you spend on soccer.  Most of the stuff everybody else admits to! 

109. Someone asks how old your daughter is & you reply U10. 

110. You find yourself saying "don't bunch up" whenever 3 or more people are close together. 

111. When you have a dinner party, you seat everyone so that they are evenly distributed (not too many big or small ones together). 

112. You count shots on goal instead of sheep to get to sleep. 

113. You start watching the Weather Channel to get 5 & 10 day forecasts so you can plan practices or games accordingly (even applies to indoor with regard to travel). 

114. You sit in your office all day yesterday wondering why no one is posting to SOCCER-COACH-L ... 

115. You have to plan your pregnancy around soccer seasons... 
     
     ...or if you've ever said: 
     

116. I really think 5 is a little young for Heather to be considered a "natural striker", Mrs. Walsh. 

117. Yeah, but Nomar Garciaparra's BEST sport was... 

118. Because none of the English-language channels have the %#$@ game on, that's why! 

119. No, Mr. MacDonald, putting more air into it will not make it a #4 ball. 

120. Yes, Derek, it really went a long way; but remember how we did the kickoff in practice? 

121. Those are hockey shinguards, Samatha. I think your brother is playing a trick on you. 

122. No, Mr. MacDonald, that's a VOLLEYball. There most certainly IS a difference. 

123. I've got nothing against other sports...in their proper role as cross-training. 

124. I think I need to explain the word "tackle" again, Derek. 

125. Here, Mr. MacDonald, I've got an extra ball Dougie can use. 

126. No, Mr. MacDonald, putting more air into it will not make it a #4 ball. 

127. No, Mr. MacDonald, that's a VOLLEYball. There most certainly IS a difference. 

128. Here, Mr. MacDonald, I've got an extra ball Dougie can use.