US Youth Soccer has finally gotten a handful of people to post regular articles on their variety of blogs. As I get more time, I have a whole bunch of their posts I want to write about. But with little time now, I had to quick link to this post by Susan Boyd, who blogs for the USYSA from a ‘parent perspective’. One of her recent posts talks about the huge backlog of yardwork and the root cause of it all:

My deck taunts me with its reminder of all the projects I have left undone using winter as an excuse. Or perhaps I should say seven or eight winters as an excuse. My home is so bad that even aluminum siding sales people don’t bother with me.

Winter is a good excuse, especially in Wisconsin, but my real excuse for this procrastination is soccer. Over the past thirteen years I can count on one hand the number of full weekends I have had totally free of soccer, and I can count on my hands and feet the number of weekends where I had just one of the days free of soccer. Whenever I drive into a new town and travel down the boulevards and lanes of that borough, I can quickly spot the homes where families with kids in sports dwell. The good intentions are evident, but the follow through doesn’t exist.

These houses have a rake lying mid-stroke on the lawn, half of their shutters painted, and plants in their plastic containers lined up alongside a garden bed. […] These otherwise handsome homes exhibit a barrenness of orderliness and polish. The fallen tree branches of last autumn join the fallen tree branches of spring to create a thatched barrier stretching from one end of the lawn to the other. […] The derelict look of these homes belies the joy that exists inside.

Sure, a number of families can hire landscapers and maids to handle the housework that gets left undone due to soccer. But for the rest of us, it just goes undone. My neighbors definitely know when soccer season starts and ends. The end of the spring season is easy to recognize. The yard gets mowed before it reaches a foot in height and flowers suddenly appear in the flower beds, replacing all variety of weeds.

I’m sure my neighbors don’t appreciate my sports timed yardwork, but I’d rather spend a cold rainy day on a touchline than a sunny warm day pulling weeds. No contest 🙂