Category: culture

I’d almost given up on pick up soccer.

In Toronto, if you’re looking to play soccer on a semi-regular basis you’d have better luck finding an Ayahuasca ceremony than a game that starts before 9pm an hour away from you. I suppose credit is due to the fact that soccer is popular (this wasn’t always the case, and there was a humiliating period of time in the late 90s where more people were playing “Ultimate” frisbee than soccer). However, finding people to play with casually — the sort of pick up game I played when I first moved to the city — has gone by the wayside in lieu of organizations such as Toronto Sport and Social Club and apps such as OpenSports.

I ran a co-ed pick up game for several years. This was after several previous migratory years of word-of-mouth and occasionally stable runs with a group of friends and acquaintances at locations across the city (note: if you want to discover a city, this is a very good way). Back then there was no leader per se, however, as good as that sounds I feel that either this part, or someone electing themself as the certifiably wrong leader, led to the instability. The pick up game I ran was fairly stable: Sundays in Stanley Park. Sometimes we were hungover, sometimes we treated it with the reverence of Mass. I met some very interesting people over those years, from a variety of backgrounds, and I’m pretty sure that, beyond fresh air and exercise, it was these relationships that contributed to helping me find myself. A secure base, as we say in the therapy biz.

These things don’t last long. They just don’t. Whether it’s a writers’ group (which I co-ran for 9yrs) or pick up soccer, sometimes things just don’t work in the long-run. Democracy kinda sucks when it’s on the level of things like this: people don’t show without giving notice, or want to change the start time to suit their own needs. In a fictional country, as well as mandatory military service, there should also be the option of organizing a regular pick up sports game (as well as the option of working in a retail environment during the Christmas season, particularly in the Holt Renfrew concourse).

For the last 10 years, for better or worse, I’ve been involved with associations like TSSC in order to get my soccer fix — organizing things sucks, and why not pay for the privilege of walking onto a semi-pro pitch if you can, and not the community fields pockmarked with holes and strewn with tree branches and dog shit, using gym bags as goal posts. But I kinda lost my religion around these organized games over time. They were inconveniently scheduled (I can go into great detail about what it’s like to play soccer at 11pm on a Sunday) and if you weren’t able to put together a hand-selected team to register then you were individually thrown into a randomized team, which was basically admitting you weren’t going to win many games due to lack of familiarity with each other (that is, if you got along). I hated forgetting — because life — about each sign-up deadline only to discover that it was booked solid, then putting myself on a sub list.

One day, a bartender who is also a reader of mine, commented on my Ajax scarf (this was versus Juventus in the Champions League quarter finals, first round). We spoke a bit about playing pick up, and he mentioned that there was a bunch of people that met @ 3pm on Sundays at ________ Park. I didn’t know what to expect, and yet I secretly hoped it could work out. What with my partner on an extended trip across the Atlantic, I found myself available, and along came the first Sunday, and it was warm and sunny…so I went, secretly hoping magic would happen.

I had to stick my neck out. It looked like a bunch of older men at first, and I wondered if I’d intruded into a more private event, but as people showed up I could see this was a regular thing that had been going on for years, that travelled on word-of-mouth only. The range of ages went from 20-something to 50-something. Unlike a lot of pick up I played when I moved to Toronto there was no prima donna behaviour, although there were comically long periods where the older Latinx organizers argued over the size of the field-of-play and other distractions. On the sideline was a group of “fans,” friends of the older players, who brought beer and cheered any runs at goal. My Spanish has grown, let’s put it that way.

It was disorganized and basic, and I loved it. I instantly appreciated the casual nature of the group, their insistence that I bring people with me next time, the beer that one of the players handed me afterward. Everyone was there to have a good time, and there was to be a BBQ afterward (which I was unable to stay for). I can’t put it much more plainly, but this is the Toronto I adore. These are my people.