Sporting memories: Having a rivalry with my football team-mate, Tristan

I suppose it won't hurt to use the guy's real first name. There's probably quite a few people out there with this name after all.

I didn't really start to realize that I was destined for greatness in football of the soccer variety (henceforth to be referred to as football) until I was around 12 years old. Prior to that I suppose you could say that I knew I was better than most, but I didn't really start to take it seriously until the coaches started approaching me and encouraging me to go to camps and to join private leagues rather than community ones, and I also started being selected near the top even when playing pick up games with people years older than I was in the park.

I started to become quite competitive about this after I became aware of this, and things could get quite heated because of this. I was initially quite a a polite player, but later on in my "career" I started to get some pretty dirty tactics into my personal playbook .

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When I ended up on a private team in my freshman (first) year of high school, I also was playing on the high school team in the lower division of junior-varsity. I still look back on those days and feel like I could have and should have been on the top team, the varsity team. But because I was new to that school and the coaches they started me out on the lower level team.

Attempting to play in a private league and the public high school team simultaneously was always going to introduce problems because practices were going to conflict as were some of the games. At the urging of my parents the private league took priority and this meant that I was kind of resented by the coaches and even some of the other players on the high school team.

One person that resented me the most was a classmate named Tristan, and even though it is been over 30 years, I can still see that guy's face in my head.

Tristan was a midfielder who was probably an average player. Tristan was a product of the USA public coaching of football in that he didn't really know how to play the sport properly. He would foul badly because he seemed to be playing mostly American football but with only kicking. He was too rough and would get calls against him regularly and be warned by the officials. Other times he would get away with it because as bad as the coaching tended to be in public leagues, the officiating was often worse.

Tristan was a bruiser and we butted heads often because while I was only trying to help him improve, he saw my "coaching" as being condescending. I guess I can see that now but if Tristan had been playing in the private league that I was also involved in and he was not, he would likely be red carded early in every single game as rough as he played.

I recall one day that Tristan decided to shove me in the middle of a game even though we were on the same team. Why? Because I was trying to get him to stop playing so rough because we were giving away a lot of free kicks to the opposition, one of which resulted in a PK and a goal against us.

Tristan was bigger than me, but I was definitely the better football player. For the remainder of that game I spent a lot of time hard passing the ball to Tristan sometimes not even on the ground with the sole intention being to slam him with the ball. We were already down by so many points in that game that victory was not going to happen, so I just decided to punish Tristan for the rest of the game. I can still hear him shouting "what the hell dude?" to me as I smirked at walked in the other direction.

During practice the following week my bullying of Tristan kind of continued, I was honing my passing skills by launching the ball at him on a regular basis and much of time succeeding in hitting him. I don't think I really had an objective here, I was just being a jerk but eventually I would lay off of it.

It got to the point where the coach realized that he couldn't put me and Tristan on the field at the same time because we were more interested in beating one another than we were in beating the other team... and yes, I realize this was and is extremely petty.

Unfortunately for Tristan this resulted in him often riding the bench and not playing at all because I was a far better player than he was. I kind of feared him in the hallways of school because despite the fact that I was the superior football player, Tristan could probably beat me up in a hallway fight rather easily.

This all ended about halfway through the season when I was moved to varsity, the top league in the school. Then Tristan started to get more game time.

It was kind of nice what happened next. Tristan and I made up and he started actually asking me for advice on how to improve and he actually listened when I told him about how his play-style was completely against the rules and it wasn't going to do him any good to just be the team "tough guy." This isn't ice hockey after all.

He ended up improving quite a bit once he took my advice but the crazy thing is that the coaches never encouraged him to not play this way. They seemed to enjoy it but as I have mentioned many times before, the football of the soccer variety coaches back in those days were more often than not just some guy who was getting paid a tiny bit of money to babysit some teenagers after school. They often knew next to nothing about how the sport operates.

I ended up leaving that high school after just one year on the team and would later find out that Tristan went on to be a relatively valuable member of the varsity team in his senior year. I like to think that I was at least somewhat responsible for his turnaround.

One thing that has always been on my mind though is that with his aggressive style of play, and the fact that he was quite a bit bigger than other kids on the team, why wasn't he encouraged to play American football? I think he would have excelled at that.