Through my youth, 20s and early 30s, I was known as Rahul the soccer player. Hard working. Gritty. Fast. Strong. Consistent. Reliable. Leader.
I was the starting right midfielder for the Concordia University Stingers in Montreal, and eventually the starting centre midfielder for Norvan in the Vancouver Premier division. I used to pay money to go and watch Norvan play when I was a kid. Now I was playing for them. The significance wasn’t lost on me.
Soccer was my thing.
Until MS said it wasn’t.
After losing my ability to play due to balance issues, I coached the men’s over-35 team I would have played on. As a coach, I used a cane, forearm crutches, and then a wheelchair.
It turned out you can still coach a soccer team from a wheelchair. Planning line ups. Developing strategy. Providing instructions. Calming guys down when they were going to lose it. Boosting players up when they were hanging their heads. It was best team I have ever been a part of. Not in terms of natural skill. But the character of the players. Their work ethic. Humour. Comradery. Willingness to give everything they had, every game. I never had to yell at guys to work harder.
I coached the team for 13 years, although I should have been fired after 3 years if anyone bothered to look at the team’s wins and losses.
Over the years, the guys would thank me profusely for spending my free time coaching them. The quality of the bottle of scotch they would get me at the end of the year was directly correlated to how many games we lost.
What they probably don’t realize, still to this day, is that they gave me so much more than I ever gave them. It was a critical time for me as I was battling MS physically and more importantly, mentally. They made the difference between success and failure.
In the midst of my coaching career, my son Daniel showed that he was a naturally gifted athlete. He was playing soccer one day, and people were noticing him. A dad yelled, “whose kid is that? Whose kid?” He looked at all of the parents on the sideline aside from me sitting in my cherry red scooter. Eventually I said, “he’s my son”. Surprised, the loud dad said, “but how do you run him through drills in the backyard. I looked at him, chuckled, and said, “I don’t”.
When the kids were really young, it annoyed me that I couldn’t play soccer anymore. There was so much to teach them. Body positioning. Technique. Subtleties of the game.
But I quickly realized that each of our kids have Cathy and my sporty genetics. More importantly, they naturally have incredible work ethics. Learning abilities. Tenacity. Drive. Rather than running a sports clinic in our back yard, I watch their games as a fan and let their coaches guide them and let their natural abilities shine.
As I was sitting on the front porch one day, Daniel walked past with a ball looking for one of his siblings to play pass with. Finding none, and me unable to play, I asked him, “why don’t you use the stairs?”
Today, our three kids pass the ball to the eight concrete stairs in front of our house. If they get the ball off the ground, they hit the concrete stair above. If they hit the edge of that stair, the ball comes back at them at a funny angle. Perfect for increasing agility and reaction time.
Sitting on the front porch in my wheelchair this weekend, I was watching Daniel use the concrete stairs as a “dad passer replacement”. I was strangely okay with that. The kid has developed so much skill even though I haven’t trained him in the backyard.
As he was wrapping up his stair session, I said, “alright, one more challenge for you, superstar. Flick the ball up so I can head it back to you from my wheelchair.” It took five tries, but he delivered the perfect pass. The correct weight and height. I connected. In my mind, my diving header went into the net past the goal keeper.
I’m still in the game. My role has just changed. Not better or worse, just different. The path to adapt to my new role has been at times arduous. Revealing. Rewarding. But as I have learned, anything worth doing is never easy.