Soccer

Soccer

To learn to play soccer is to learn to play the world's most popular sport. This means that if you are looking for a pick-up soccer game, you can likely find one nearly any place in the world. It is so beautiful in its simplicity: you need a ball, people, and a flat place to play. You can make goals out of anything. Find yourself anywhere in the world and if you are a competent soccer player you have a point of entry into the local place and culture.

Yet more than this, to learn to play soccer is to transform your feet from things that are largely inert into second hands. I remember the time I realized I was a real soccer player. I was seventeen, in France on a summer exchange program, and in a college cafeteria when someone dropped a tray and without thinking I tried to catch it with my feet. That is what soccer does: it turns your feet into second hands.

Building this deeper relationship with your feet as not simply the stumps you walk around on, but surfaces with which you can control a ball precisely– to play well you have to learn how to pass, shoot, trap the ball with your feet. All of this requires developing timing and touch control with a part of the body that unless you use it in this way does not develop this kind of intelligence. And so, viewed through the lens of restorative practice, soccer is a vector for learning a new language: the language of the feet. It turns the things you walk around on into much more interesting tools.