Welcome to Eastside Soccer!

If this is your first year in Eastside, we hope your child will have the time of his or her life playing the greatest game in the world.  As a soccer parent, you have a very important role in your child's view of the game.  You have the power to make it a great experience or a bad experience, despite the best efforts of the coach.  Eastside has a goal to help everyone involved in the organization to develop their skills to the best of their desire and ability.  This includes parents.  We hope you will take the job of being the best soccer parent you can be, very seriously.  So what does this mean?  First and foremost, you need to keep the proper persepctive on the game - from your child's view - not from your view.  Eastside emphasizes fun and learning, not necessarily winning.

There's nothing worse than an obnoxious soccer parent. We've all seen him or her. They may or may not actually swear at the players on the field, but they are definitely out for blood!  Listening to them, you would think it was the world cup, (which is less important than many people make it out to be).

For me, I love to watch my boys play soccer.  Some days they don't put as much effort into their game as I think they should, but on other days, they are brilliant soccer players.  Sometimes there's an inexperienced ref that makes a terrible call, but sometimes the ref makes a bad call against the other team.  Sometimes the other team plays dirty and the ref doesn't catch it, but sometimes our players deserve a yellow card.  I think it all evens out, and if it doesn't, you know what --- by the end of the week, I will have forget the details, and remember only the smile on my son's face when we went for hot chocolate after the game.

For all of our player's sake, please keep things in perspective and don't take the game too seriously.  Cheer for your kids!  But also cheer when a player on the other team makes a good play as well. This is how we teach sportsmanship and empathy to our children.

Something every soccer parent needs to read ... (opens in new window-leaves the Eastside site)

James Ridgway
President
Eastside Youth Soccer Association.