TULSA — A local 9-year-old has informed his mother, his coach, his AYSO regional commissioner, and a genuinely confused referee that he will not, at any point during the upcoming U-10 recreational soccer season, be wearing “any of that shinguard shit.”
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The boy, who stands four foot two and weighs approximately 68 pounds, is entering his fourth year of youth soccer. He has, over the course of those four years, been kicked in the shin an estimated 340 times. He has bled in the presence of other parents. He has, on one memorable Saturday in October, briefly limped.
He does not care.
“I don’t feel it,” the third-grader said Wednesday, standing on the sideline in cleats and mismatched socks, arms crossed with the confidence of a man who has never once questioned his own body. “It’s just, like, a leg. It’s a leg. My leg is fine. Shinguards are for pussies.”
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His mother, a 38-year-old dental hygienist, immediately apologized.
“He heard that from his father,” she said. “We are working on it.”
The family has been, by his mother’s account, in a low-grade eight-month standoff with the entire recreational soccer league of northeastern Oklahoma over the issue. AYSO rules require shinguards. The rules are, sources confirm, non-negotiable. The 9-year-old is, sources also confirm, non-negotiable.
“He put a pair on once,” his mother said. “Once. In April. He took them off in the parking lot before the game and threw them into the woods. Actually threw them. Like a bouquet. My husband cheered.”
The boy’s father, a 41-year-old HVAC contractor, when reached for comment, said only: “The kid’s built different.”
The 9-year-old has, in the intervening months, worn everything except shinguards to games — a rolled-up sock, a piece of cardboard duct-taped to his leg, and on one occasion in early September, a folded-up McDonald’s placemat that his coach eventually confiscated. He is currently unaware that all three of these were also against the rules, and if informed, would almost certainly not care.
His coach, a mild-mannered accountant who volunteered for this six months ago and now deeply regrets it, has stopped fighting.
“I said the rules were the rules,” the coach said. “He said the rules were ‘gay.’ I asked him not to use that word. He said, quote, my bad, Coach. Then he ran onto the field. It was the third quarter. I did not stop him.”
The boy, meanwhile, has been kicked in both shins so many times this fall that pediatricians who have examined him have described the resulting bruising as “consistent with a much older person, possibly a small stuntman.”
He has not complained. Not once.
At Saturday’s game, he scored two goals and took a cleat to the front of the tibia so hard it made a sound. He walked it off in approximately eleven seconds.
“That one kinda hurt,” he admitted afterward, chewing an orange slice.
He then asked his mother if he could have a Monster Energy.
She said no. He shrugged. He walked away.
He has, sources confirm, a game Wednesday. He will not, sources confirm, be wearing shinguards.