For two years after college, I taught in a girls’ boarding school. I lived in a dorm, taught five classes a day, and coached three sports (tennis, soccer, and badminton–and yes, badminton really IS a sport, and no, I don’t know anything about it except that my tennis skills did NOT translate and I sucked at it). I like to think that I was a kind and approachable teacher, that I was understanding and sympathetic, but really, those girls drove me batty with their whining and their excuses and their why-can’t-I-have-ONE-more extension?

My pedagogy could be described in three words: SUCK. IT. UP.

I was 22, and I believed that if you didn’t pay attention in class you deserved to fail the test and if you didn’t pay attention at practice you deserved to run wind sprints. I’m 38 now, and I still believe those things although until recently I had forgotten just how much.

I’m helping to coach Henry’s pee wee soccer team this year. I agreed not because I have any great confidence in my coaching skills but because watching Henry play soccer last year nearly gave me a stroke, what with all the not paying attention and hugging the other players and doing pretend karate on the field. If I coached, I figured, I could AT LEAST keep my kid in line.

For the most part, this soccer season has been a terrific experience. The other coach and I are good friends, primarily because we share the same sense of humor and buck-up approach to parenting. The kids themselves are very sweet and funny and nice to each other, and the parents are a great group. Our kids have learned a lot about teamwork and good sportsmanship, and have even picked up some soccer skills along the way.

But. But! I’m about to start telling people to suck it up and run some sprints, which maybe isn’t a good coaching approach with five-year-olds.

The club where we’re playing in is a feeder for a competitive league, and even in the under-six division, you can see who the really good kids and teams are. Wade has been fascinated by the team that practices next to us on Thursday nights; it is coached by four dads, who yell at the kids and make them run and say things like, “That was pathetic! PATHETIC!” Our practices, on the other hand, are very encouraging! and positive! and enthusiastic! Because our team is coached by moms, see.

But even moms have their breaking point.

We’ve been working on specific skills–dribbling, shooting, tackling, trapping–and the kids have mastered those (okay, sort of–our standards are pretty low here). This week we decided we would take on goal kicks and throw-ins, since we have about 400 of each in every game and it takes a good three minutes to set our kids up EVERY SINGLE TIME. So we planned two drills, split the kids into two groups of three, and went to work.

It was hellish.

Half of the kids were engaging with the drills, challenging themselves to throw and kick farther and stronger. Half of the team was running and listening and asking questions. Half of the team was learning something. The other half of the team was lying down in the grass, hold hands, asking me what I ate for lunch, telling me where they are going on vacation this summer, practicing ballet and cheerleading and karate (guess who!) and generally NOT PAYING ATTENTION. And when they were paying attention, they were saying things like, “This is boring!” and “I already KNOW how to do this!” and “I don’t really like it when the ball touches me.”

I REALLY wanted to make that half of the team run some sprints.

I like that we’re the nice coaches, that we’re the mom coaches; I like that our kids are having fun and enjoying soccer. I like that we have tried to be fair about playing time and who gets to do throw-ins and goal kicks. But the truth is that the kids who pay attention in practice have improved more than the kids who don’t and they are the kids who play the best in the games. The kids who don’t pay attention–in practice, in the games–are, ironically, the ones who complain the most when they don’t get to play or when the other team scores a goal. And now we’re having to decide if, for these last two games, we will reward the kids who have worked really hard with more playing time or just press on with the fairness policy.

In the end, I wish I had some way to make them understand that if they would just PAY ATTENTION for FIVE MINUTES and learn where to stand during a goal kick, they would have even MORE fun. Or I wish that they were ten years older and I could tell them to suck it up and start running.