On a Rainy Night in Gatlinburg
The lasting memory of the greatest soccer match I ever coached.
This past Saturday, Haley and I stayed up watching BYU’s epic comeback against North Carolina in the quarterfinals of the NCAA women’s soccer tournament. Down 3-nil at halftime, the Cougars scored early in the second and thrice after the 80th minute—including a game-winner with just over a minute left—to advance to the semis.
The thriller between BYU and UNC made me think back to the most epic game of soccer I ever coached, nearly five years ago to date.
It was a cold December night in Gatlinburg. The rain had been falling in buckets since noon. The grass was yellowed and torn, with mud pockets dotting the surface like a scene from a battlefield in a World War I flick.
I paced the sideline nervously. I glared at the second hand on my wristwatch, waiting for our last field player to arrive as I tried not to make eye contact with the center referee. It was 8:30 p.m., and he was straining for my attention, typing Morris code onto his own wrist, giving me the universal gesture for, “Come on, guy, it’s time to get this started so we can put on dry clothes and get into warm beds before midnight.”
We were already five hours behind schedule, with no chance of winning the tournament. And I was about to put the backup goalie on when I saw Anna emerge from the darkness. I put my arm out; the keeper sat back down as Anna dropped her bag beside the bench, mouthed “sorry,” and ran onto the pitch just as the ref blew his whistle.
The tournament was our last set of warm-up fixtures before State League kicked off in January, and I thought we had a real chance at silverware in what I knew was my last year of coaching before taking an extended leave of absence for my family.
Before getting in my Honda Civic that morning, I had checked the weather app on my phone just to be sure the TV reports were accurate. The sun was shining in the blue sky. But the forecast was foreboding: heavy winds and torrential downpours were expected to make their way into Gatlinburg by noon. Our first tournament game was scheduled to kick off at 11 a.m.
I parked just in front of the fields at Rocky Top Sports World. It was a few minutes past 10 a.m., and in the hour it took for me to drive in from Knoxville, clouds had formed over the mountain peaks in the backdrop. The sun was still shining. Though I was nearly blown back in my seat when I opened the door to get out of the car.
The wind gusts were so powerful that I watched as a ball on the field in front of me rolled from the sideline into an open net a hundred yards away. It was incredible. But the girls who’d shown up early for warmups hadn’t noticed. They’d been busy trying to protect one of their own from being squashed by a runaway porta-potty.
To no one’s surprise, the tournament organizers announced that all morning games would be temporarily suspended until they could ensure no player was at risk of being crushed by an outdoor toilet or blown into the mountains beyond.
By noon, the rain began to pour just as predicted. The wind was so unrelenting that the raindrops flew sideways into my eyes. I had to position my flimsy umbrella in front of my chest to keep from being blinded. Lightning struck and thunder rumbled overhead as coaches and players were sent inside to wait for updates.
As other high schoolers competed in a speedcubing competition on the other end of the gymnasium, coaches were instructed that the tournament would move forward once the storms ceased. Halves would be cut to 20 minutes to ensure every game wrapped up by midnight. The earliest start time was set for 5 p.m.—about when our second game was initially expected to finish.
By the time the referee blew the whistle to start our first game against a team from Atlanta, the field looked as if it had been prepped for a Spartan Race and not two halves of the most beautiful game on earth. The ball sloshed around in the mud, and players slid past both it and each other as they scrambled to find their footing in the stew. We went down early to a garbage goal but were growing into the game by the start of the second half. And then a bolt of lightning struck somewhere in the mountains and the referee sent everyone to their cars to wait out the storm.
The dreadful hour of waiting ended when I got a text message that the game would not be restarted, and the score was final.
Eighteen players had started the day with me. But many had evening plans they either couldn’t or wouldn’t cancel for a silly preseason soccer tournament played in a monsoon. Before our second game against the Greeneville Galaxy, I would be lucky to have 11 players.
I wasn’t feeling optimistic. The Galaxy were no joke. They strolled in wearing matching warmup kits above their jerseys and carrying brand-name bags with their last names, uniform numbers, and club crest embroidered onto them. Their coach was a middle-aged Englishman in a puffy Arsene Wenger coat who donned a stoic glare he’d learned from imitating Premier League managers before moving to America, where the road to success is paved in exorbitant fees paid by suburban soccer parents who trusted he knew what he was doing based on his accent alone.
My girls were scrappers, not All-Stars. And I, like all the coaches at Emerald’s soccer club, was a volunteer.
The Englishman oozed confidence. From his warmup routine alone, I could see he had turned his girls into blonde-haired soccer robots, trained to follow his every instruction. I could sense that he pitied us, hanging around on the other side of the field, lazily passing balls in the mud and trying to keep warm. In the pre-game huddle, he neither grinned nor bantered. Instead, he pulled out a dry-erase board and scribbled out the exact formations and tactics his machines would use to destroy us.
This is where observation becomes imperative, my friends. Because the Englishman hadn’t taken a close enough look at his surroundings.
This soccer field in Gatlinburg was not some perfectly manicured pitch in England or suburbia. It was 16th Street Park. It was Rio de Janeiro, a dirt lot in Angola, a waterlogged stretch of muddy farmland in Barbados. This was my kitchen, and my girls were about to cook.
“This weather fricken sucks,” I told my team as rain pelted the steel bench behind us. “This field fricken sucks. But you have no control over that.”
“The only thing you have control over is what’s inside your chest,” I said, pounding at the skin just above my heart. “Once you cross this white line, it’s 11v11. You’re playing soccer. Nothing else matters. Go hard, and don’t let up.”
From the get-go, the Galaxy tried to find their rhythm. They passed the ball neatly along the backline and made runs the Englishman had diagrammed for them in what I imagined were meticulous training sessions he had copied from videos of Sir Alex Ferguson on YouTube. I didn’t care for that nonsense, especially knowing that even the faintest rumbling of thunder overhead would land my team in the same precarious situation that handed us our opening loss.
Whenever our players got hold of the ball, I screamed, “BOOT IT,” transforming myself into every American soccer parent. “Get the ball upfield!” There was no point in trying to string together passes or dribbling into the penalty box; the ball rarely traveled five yards before getting sucked into a mudhole.
What the game lacked in fluidity, however, it made up for in intensity. My girls flew into tackles like a live-action filming of Gladiator. The Englishman grew furious at his team’s inability to open the scoring. He went to his abundant bench, swapping players in and out and instructing them to “squeeze” and play the early ball while contorting his hands to form indiscernible shapes like a raver playing with glowsticks at a nightclub.
At halftime, the score was 0-0. I smiled, looking over to see my opponent gesticulating angrily at the dry-erase board. My girls were breathing hard; they had never played like this before, with their hearts beating outside their bodies. But they were stuck in, and I knew God would look upon his battered children with favor if we didn’t let up.
The second half started, and the Englishman pleaded with his girls to keep their composure. And when that didn’t work, he pleaded with the center ref for a hand in the affair. “SIR, THAT’S A PENALTY, SIR!” he shouted when Abby M, our center-back, tackled his forward as she geared up to shoot and left her writhing in the mud. “THAT’S INSIDE THE BOX, SIR!”
The referee justly waved away the protests.
I countered the Englishman’s rage with encouragement to my gladiators, walking the sideline like a man possessed. “You’ve got this girls! Don’t let up!” But the clock was winding down, and no points were to be awarded for best scrap.
So I decided to change up my tactics.
I’m not afraid to admit it. When I saw the Galaxy with its bounty of substitutes, British coach, matching socks, I was scared. My first coaching season two years earlier we had leaked goals like an open faucet, regularly being pummelled 7-2 and 5-nil. The wounds were still raw. This was a new team with bright prospects. I didn’t want them to suffer as the veterans had. So I abandoned my instincts, setting up in a defensive 4-3-3, with our best player at left-back.
Abbie Z was the fastest girl on any soccer field in Tennessee—literally the defending state silver-medalist in the 400-meter—with lungs for days and explosive dribbling ability. She could let them rip from distance, too. But the slop had limited her ability to overlap and join the attack.
There were only five minutes left in the game. The Englishman’s sign language grew more exaggerated as he implored his players to stay on their feet. Sensing an opportunity, I sent Abbie up as the center forward, and I shouted for every player on the field to hoof the ball in her direction.
Shortly after the switch, Abbie latched onto a ball at midfield. She dribbled past three players then unleashed from outside the 18. The goalkeeper parried it away for a corner.
Four minutes remained, and this is when we switch to present tense.
She’s on the ball again. This time, rather than going it alone, Abbie hits the winger on her right, who smacks a one-time rocket to the far corner. But the keeper does her best Hope Solo impression and gets it out with her outstretched fingertips.
Three minutes left. We win back possession off the break. The right winger has it at her feet with Abbie and two other girls crashing into the box. She belts in a low cross, and just before one of the forwards can get a toe to it, the center-back hits a gymnastics split and deflects it away with the point of her big toe.
Now entering squeaky bum time: just under two minutes left. And we’ve all seen this film before. The more we push forward, the more we risk being countered. I stop looking at my watch and shout for the girls to keep flooding the box. Everyone up. No defending. This is a sandlot in Nicaragua, a metal cage in Montenegro.
And that’s when it happens.
A clearance falls to Abbie’s feet. She nestles the ball with the outside of her right foot, and it takes a short bounce in front of her body. Instead of turning to meet the center-back head-on, she touches it once, then twice toward our end of the field. This draws the defender in. But it’s a trick: a millisecond before she can poke at the ball with her boot, Abbie turns to her right, evading the tackle, and glances up to see our left winger Anna—the player who had just barely made it for the start of the game—making a run into the box.
A valley has opened up between the center and right backs, but the angle is impossible…until Abbie rewrites the laws of physics and slices the ball through like a guillotine blade through neckbone.
Anna is a veteran. A springbok. A player who is as likely to dribble the ball out of bounds or trip over her untied laces as to receive the weighted pass neatly with her left foot and take a touch, full speed, at the goalie. But she does it. She’s in the box, the defender at her back scrambling to get inside to tackle the ball away.
I no longer hear the Englishman or the rain pounding the pavement behind me because Anna takes another touch, closing her angle as the keeper rushes out to challenge her. What is she doing? I think to myself. She’s got only the tightest space left to slot the ball through, less than 12 inches between the keeper’s right arm and the near post. To get it right would require her to strike the ball across her body with her left foot and curve it just inside the post as the keeper dives to paw it away. But this is a coliseum in Rome. This is Elysium.
The ball kisses the back of the net, and I grab my head with both hands. My mouth is wide open. I am the living incarnation of The Scream. Seconds later a roar erupts from inside my gut. The linesman, who is just yards away, checks his watch frantically. He shakes his head in disbelief. “She hit that ball just as the clock expired,” he says as he walks by me with his flag down at his side.
I wait for the center ref to call it back. For VAR to intervene or a lightning bolt to soar through the night sky and turn me into a corpse. But instead, I hear only the final whistle.
I pump my fist in the air and skip down the sideline. I am ebullient and only just manage to keep myself from bellyflopping into the mud like Maradona on the rainy night in 2009 when Argentina beat Peru to make the World Cup. The player’s celebration is equally raucous. They’re hugging, jumping up and down like they’ve also just made it to the World Cup finals.
Keeping with tradition, I go to greet the Englishman and thank him for the scrap. But he offers only a limp handshake and no eye contact before screaming at his players to grab their Nike bags and march to the corner flag, where he digs into them. He doesn’t realize it wasn’t their fault they’d been outhearted. It was his.
On the way home that night, I opened up WhatsApp on my phone and sent four frantic voice notes to Mickey, who for years in high school and college I’d shared imaginary scenarios with of what I’d do when I finally started coaching. He had made his debut on the sideline earlier than I did and retired earlier, too. I thought I’d lost the voice notes until 2021 when he dug them back up and sent them to me. I listened to them laughing, crying, shrieking, groaning, and crying again just before I wrote this.
Because it’s been five years, and I still miss my girls every time I drive by the Sansom Sports Complex or any other soccer field where kids kick balls in matching jerseys with their parents watching in camping chairs from the sideline.
My coaching leave has extended far longer than I’d imagined when I retired that June so Haley and I could start a family. But I’m grateful to keep in touch with many of these girls—Dunny, who was almost trampled by the porta-potty, just got married; Abby, the center-back who’d jumped to save her and hoofed the ball that landed at Abbie Z’s feet, played four seasons of adult soccer with me before moving to the Midwest after college; Anna, the goalscorer, is also nearly married; others have long hung up their boots and are earning master’s degrees (Zoe) or moving to Rwanda to use sport to make people’s lives better (Lucy). I searched Google just before I hit publish, and I see Abbie Z is still out there writing little miracles: she was named first-team all-conference for Carson-Newman earlier this month.
The tears are flowing now, so it’s about time I stop. But I can’t wait to be back on the sideline again, regardless of place or the weather. Maybe this time, it’ll be my little girl—the one I retired for—out there notching impossible goals on cold, rainy nights in December. You never know.
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Even in the wet, the slop, the mud, and the most controversial: America, it's the beautiful game. Well written (and well coached), my friend.