Ten Years From Now

There's going to be a last game.

Not the one you're thinking about — not a senior night with a banner and a photo. Most last games are ordinary. A Tuesday in a season that ended early, or a tournament in June, or a spring when he mentioned in the car that he was thinking about not playing next year and you didn't quite register that it had already happened.

Nobody tells you which one it is while you're in it. That's the part every parent I've talked to about this mentions, and it's the reason I wanted this article to exist somewhere other than at the end.

What actually remains

I've asked a lot of parents whose kids have finished. The answers are remarkably consistent, and almost none of them are about lacrosse.

Nobody remembers the scores. Not one. Ten years of Saturdays, four hundred games, and the record is entirely gone within about eighteen months.

They remember the car. The drive home, the drive in, the specific gas station, the order at the drive-through, the conversations that happened sideways while looking at a road. If you're wondering which part of the decade is the part, it's that one.

They remember the weather. Freezing March mornings under a blanket while your young athlete warmed up. The one tournament in the rain. Something about standing outside for a decade makes the conditions stick.

They remember other people's kids. The teammates who came through the house, the parents on the next folding chair, the coach who mattered.

And they remember how he was. Not how he played — how he carried himself, what he did after a bad one, the season he decided to be serious about it. The character stuff is what survives, which is why the character stuff is what's worth paying attention to as you go.

What he'll take with him

The lacrosse mostly stops. What doesn't:

A relationship with failure that very few people have. He'll have been wrong in public, with a number attached, several thousand times, and continued. That shows up in job interviews, in hard conversations, in every part of adult life that requires being visibly imperfect and functional at the same time. It's the thing I'd single out from the whole decade.

A body he knows how to look after. How to warm up, how to build strength safely, how to rest deliberately, how to come back from a setback.

The experience of doing something hard on a schedule. Not because he felt like it. Because it was Tuesday.

And the knowledge that he was the one who volunteered. Whatever else changes about him, he'll always have been the kid who put his hand up for the job nobody wanted.

Suggestions on what you can do with the years you've got

Take the photographs now. Not of saves — of the ordinary stuff. The gear pile by the door, him asleep in the car, the fourth-grade team on a bad field. You'll want those and you won't be able to go back for them.

Write down one line a season. What he was like that year. Two minutes, once a year, and in ten years you'll have something nobody else has.

Keep the small rituals. The post-game place, the pre-game song, the specific thing you always say. These are the load-bearing parts and they're invisible at the time.

Go to the boring games. The rainy Tuesday against a bad team is a game he'll not especially remember and will remember you being at.

Be the same after every one of them. This is the whole thing, repeated across the collection because it's the only instruction that matters. If your warmth doesn't move with the score, he ends the decade with a parent he can talk to. If it does, he ends it with one he manages.

And don't spend the years waiting for an outcome. Most kids don't play in college, and a family that treats the decade as an audition gets ten years of tension and one disappointment. A family that treats it as the point gets ten years.

By age: third and fourth grade, you'll think you have forever. Fifth and sixth is the golden stretch in more ways than the technical one — he still wants you there and he still tells you things. Seventh and eighth, he goes quieter, and that's development rather than rejection. Ninth and tenth, you become logistics and support, and the conversations get better precisely because you stopped pushing for them. Eleventh and twelfth, it's nearly over and you'll feel it — which is a good reason to be fully present for a season that's mostly going to consist of driving.

A few things worth avoiding

Try not to bank the meaning on where it ends. The value was distributed across the whole decade, most of it in weeks that felt like nothing.

Go easy on the year you're disappointed. There'll be one — a coach, a roster, a season that went badly — and how you carry that is what he'll remember from it.

Try not to let it become the only thing you talk about. Kids whose whole relationship with a parent runs through a sport have nowhere to go when the sport ends.

And don't skip marking the end, whenever it comes and however it looks. A meal, a photo, something said out loud about what it took. Families who let it end quietly because it wasn't the ending they wanted leave a young man alone with something he doesn't have words for yet.

The last thing

One day the gear bag goes on a shelf in the garage and stays there. You'll move it a few times over the years, and every time you'll stop for a second.

What's in it isn't lacrosse equipment. It's a decade of Saturdays, a kid who learned to walk toward frightening things, and a version of your family that existed for those years and then moved on.

That's what you're building right now, in the driveway, on a Tuesday, in bad light.

It's worth doing well.

---

Ten years is what the program is actually for — third grade to twelfth, written as one arc, with rest and other sports in it because a decade has to be survivable. Three real days of a fifth-grade week are open on the site, no signup. Take a look at the free week.

Coach Greg — LAX Goalie Hub

Coaching from a coach — general information, not psychological or mental health advice. The end of a sporting career can hit a young athlete hard; if you see lasting low mood or withdrawal from things he used to enjoy, talk to your doctor, a school counselor or a mental health professional.