Kid soccer in NYC is competitive. Especially with the Wall Street crowd. Hardcore competitive.

My daughter had to tryout for the 7 year old squad. And as she got older, they ranked the kids by talent and skill. There were A, B, and even C teams. Needless to say, parents really got into it. Jockeying for position, playing time, and placement. If you think national politics is brutal, try youth athletics.

I won’t lie.

I wasn’t immune to it.

On some days, I’d wish that there was less Hufflepuff in the daughter and more Cristiano Ronaldo, but we don’t choose our parents and apparently neither our kids as well. At least, however, I wasn’t as bad as this one dad who videotaped his daughter at practice. One time, she got hit in the face by a ball and had to leave the game. When she refused to return due to shock and pain, her dad berates her on the sidelines for being weak, as she is crying. After the practice, she trails behind him as they leave the field, as he refuses to hold her hand.

Most parents were actually quite nice. I couldn’t resist poking fun at the absurdity of the NYC competition by cheering for individual players by their parents’ workplace instead of names – Go Goldman Sachs! Go Shake Shack! Go JP Morgan!

The team actually did quite well. They somehow managed to win their division even though they were matched up against teams with players a year older. They even played all boys teams and held their own.

My daughter rarely scored, but was a good defender. Because of her size and personality, she’d knock quite a few others down and was the best tackler on the team. Once, we discussed how to disrupt an opponent’s decision cycle with defense. Observe – Orient – Decide – Act can be thwarted, obscured, intercepted at every stage.  This works for all types of scenarios – sports, work, relationships.

The real life Law and Order Special Victims Unit commander once told me how he taught his division to disrupt the decision cycles of sex offenders – to swiftly interdict and investigate, preventing them from quickly lawyering up. Bruce Lee’s intercepting fist concept is also applicable here.  An opponent is often most vulnerable when he is striking mode; this is exactly the best time to strike at him.

Private school in the city cost somewhere in the 50K a year vicinity even for kindergarten. No way the daughter would get anywhere near that. But I’d like to think this was her real education or at the least a supplement.