To try and shorten this to less than ten pages without going into the sickness of a man who gets even on a woman by sucker punching her kid is really difficult for me. Summarizing just doesn't seem to bring the true flavor of this story but I'm going to try. Basically Pierson belonged to a team he loved. They had all of the chemistry of the Bad News Bears without the delinquency, and as a whole it was a troop of boys that on their good days turned a simple game into a masterpiece theater of joy, honor, beauty, and something that the parents could say days later at the water cooler "Man these kids were all over the field threading the ball to each other and really doing amazing things." and those listening would have nothing that could top what these boys gave the fans on the sidelines. There were kids on this team that didn't have as much talent but more heart to make up for it and none of them should have been cut because they all worked well together, but competitive sports always has its tragedies and Pierson was thrown into just that.
Bill, Pierson's coach, needed to step down as coach. He said he would when Courtney and I found, and recruited a man who has lived his whole life in soccer, was head of all the trainers for the entire club, a guy who played for 80,000 people on a World level of play for the Romanian National team, and had the boys hooked in to his every word and action in less than 1 minute the first time he met them. It was an honor to have his time and also at a bargain price. Bill said that he would step down in front of the President of the Board, his assistant coach, his wife and eight other parents.
He did not.
Bill let Pierson try out but it was obvious to us that Bill didn't want us around because of what we had done. (Damn us for trying to make the team better without splitting it up.) One parent, I'll call him friend, told me we should have some back up plans. So we did. Everyone looked at me like I was paranoid and told me just to keep a good attitude and that surely Pierson would make the team, after all he was rated highly, showed up 1/2 an hour before practice started, left 15-30 minutes after it ended, played every game unless he was deathly sick and all because he volunteered to do so not because his parents asked him to.
Bill's words to Courtney on the phone were "He couldn't continue to have weekly disruptions,...it was also because we had a lot of some really good people trying out,..other people agreed with his assessments, and it would be better if we went to another club, in addition this situation has caused a lot of stress for his kid."
Pierson was crushed, how could he play so well, be rated so well, give it his all, and still be cut. When I came home from work he was almost crying but being a man. I took him to Planet Marsto to play Counter-Strike and to take his mind off of things. We played against the computer's "bots" who were the terrorist, and named "Bill". We killed "Bill the Bot" about 137 times and then went home. I felt strangely better.
This morning we found out that after 10 minutes of trying out (the rest was called off because of thunder) that he made a better team. One division higher than his previous. Wow! In a strange way Bill being the way that he was benefited us. Guess we'll see him around, maybe Pierson's new team can thank him by scoring on Bill's team during a tournament or something.