Look what’s happened to this fashionable demographic group that got Bill Clinton elected twice. Well mannered and manicured, these ladies made mini-vans cool and the local soccer pitch the place to see and be seen. Well a lot has changed in the new millennium.

Once upon a time, soccer was the alternative sport for parents who did not want their kids to get their heads bashed in playing football. It was supposed to be good exercise for kids with limited risk of injury to one’s body or ego. It was supposed to be a way to avoid the stereotypical overbearing football coach who believes football is war and that six year-olds need to practice five days a week in pads in searing heat to master a basic dive play in order to be victorious on the battlefield on Saturday morning. Well it turns out the overbearing football coach has a twin: the obnoxious and antagonistic father. Let’s just call him the Soccer Oaf.

My first encounter with the Soccer Oaf was last weekend at the championship match of the Palm Bay soccer tournament. After my son’s match, we decided to take in the championship matches for fun. The first match we saw pitted a team from Orlando against a team from Jacksonville. We put our seats down by midfield to view the action—unfortunately the action on the sideline was very distracting.

“Marco, get in the game! Your play stinks,” yelled a little Oaf to one of the players from his team. “What a terrible pass,” yelled an XXXL Oaf to his son. “I will get my gun and shoot the ref if she makes the call again,” yelled the biggest Oaf of all to the crowd. After enduring 10 minutes of sportsmanship Soccer Oaf style, my son and I moved to what seemed to be a more composed end of the field. We move to the land of the Soccer Mom.

Turns out the Soccer Mom’s were a little quieter, but not great sports. When the Jacksonville team fell behind by one goal, one of the mothers said to another, let go chase balls. (For non-soccer aficionados, this means running down balls that go behind the goal line so that the kids don’t have to in order to save time. Within five minutes, however, Jacksonville had scored two quick goals to take the lead at which point a mother said, “Guess we don’t need to chase balls now since we are ahead.”

At the end of this match, we moved to the adjoining field to watch the local team play a team from Orange County (Orlando area). Unfortunately I was not much of a Spanish student so I could not understand anything the visiting team’s parents or players were saying. What I could understand, however, was that this match was extremely important to the parents. This became evident when the coach was serenaded by the parents, given a Gatorade bath and carried off the field upon winning the tournament.

What struck me about the behavior of the parents was the tremendous amount of pressure they were putting on nine year-olds in the first match and eleven year-olds in the second match. It makes me curious as to whether the new breed of Soccer Mom and the Soccer Oaf hold their kids to standards of perfection in everything they do or is this level of intensity only reserved for the sports field? Does the XXXL Oaf threaten to kill his boss when makes a bad call at work or has the soccer pitch become a safe place for what would otherwise be socially unacceptable, if not illegal, behavior?

How will these parents react when a sudden growth spurt makes their little superstar unable to move as quickly as he once did? When these kids reach puberty, will their parents believe that their best years are already behind them? Are these kids held to the same high performance standards in their academics or is school simply a necessary burden to deal with before soccer practice?

In some respects I am glad the team from Jacksonville won the tournament over the team from Orlando. With the abuse the team was taking from their parents in the first half of the match, I can only imagine how distraught the players would have been after enduring a three-hour ride home. The Orlando parents, on the other hand, simply cheered for their team and gave their sons hugs for a valiant effort. They probably also fed them dinner that day despite the loss.

For what its worth, the Orlando team was the equal of the Jacksonville squad but had fewer players on the roster and got tired down the stretch. I only wish that my son and I had been lucky enough to sit with the parents for this team because I am sure that, in the long run, they will be the winning side.