Please do not yell, curse or otherwise threaten the ball girls

In a column I wrote several months ago following a brawl at a post-season basketball game, I addressed my dislike of people being referred to as monsters, or animals, stating that summary terms such as those are, at best, poor tools with which to describe the complexity of human behavior.

In the same sense, I'm also opposed to groups of people, be they different sexes, races or ethnicities, being buttonholed, or having stereotypical traits attributed to them. A good example of this would be the awful hack comedian, who resorts that dreadful joke on racial disparity: "White dudes drive like this (shoves nose up to the imaginary steering wheel, hands at 10 and two, humming idiotically), and black dudes drive like this (leans back, right arm draped over the seat, gripping wheel with two fingers, smoothly doing a bass line with his mouth)." People are more complicated than that, to be sure, and it's somewhat insulting when we're reduced to one-dimensional caricatures.

I think the most personally hurtful of those stereotypes is the most prevalent, that being that women and girls are polite, mindful, considerate, smart, sensitive, inherently organized and able to plan things more than one day in advance, while men and boys are lazy, impudent, inconsiderate, crude, obsessed with inconsequential things like sports and completely unable to see more than one week into the future. To be fair to both sides of that, in my life I've met men, women, girls and boys onto whom you could hang all of those adjectives and then some (I was a substitute teacher for one year, and believe me, I saw the entire spectrum). As I already said, we are more complicated than that.

Though they did not exactly disprove my theory on human behavior, some of the actions I witnessed at Monday's girls soccer game between Fallston and C. Milton Wright definitely dealt it a serious blow. There, I saw young women acting in a way I, a rude little boy, would not have at the same age, and once upon a time was punished for doing the opposite.

At the game in question, which was a very important one, the outcome of which would probably decide who won the Chesapeake (upper) Division, the organizers decided to use as ball girls, the people who fetch out-of-bounds balls and supply players with new ones so they won't have to go running, pre-adolescents, girls I suspect were in the seven to nine-year-old range. Bless those girls, they were very cute, but they were a mess. They bickered over who got to hold the spare ball, they lost track of the game, they stood stock still when the players clapped their hands rather than waste breath asking for a ball, and did not have the strength to punt a ball from the sideline to the penalty box. I found myself whispering, "get her the darn ball, the defense is going to set up while you're messing around!."

As I said, this was no run-of-the-mill game. It was two very good teams going head-to-head for a shot at the division title, and it was very close, with CMW scoring both of its goals in the second half. In games that tense, players tend to get a bit feisty when things don't go their way, say a ref makes a bad out-of-bounds call, or young girl stares at you when you ask her to throw you a ball, because the opposing defense is quickly arranging itself. Not once in that game, however, did I see a Fallston or CMW athlete say anything heavier than an encouraging, "come on, girlie, throw me the ball."

I know I would not have acted so nicely, because I, the sportswriter who has railed against fans taunting the refs, about coaches asking unreasonable things of their players and people generally acting like jerks on and off the field, was a total hothead as a soccer player, and more than once was verbally abusive to the ball boys.

Maybe it was because I never actually had to serve as one, being one of those exalted few who make it to the varsity level as freshman, and it was our junior varsity members that had the ball boy duty foisted on them (You want to make a 14-year-old boy's head swell up? Give him a varsity jersey. He'll go up three hat sizes before the dismissal bell). The worst case of this had to have been in the fall of my senior year, 1997-98. Perryville, my team, was playing a road game with Joppatowne toward the end of an unremarkable season which the Panthers finished at 4-6, I believe. Joppatowne was winning 3-1 late in the game, and I, absolutely seething because two of my shots had pinged off the cross bar, had already been warned by the referee to tone down the foul language. A ball was deflected out of bounds deep in the Joppatowne half, and I, playing as a winger, was to take the throw in, which I wanted to get off quickly because one of my strikers was unmarked and making a run to the corner.

Joppatowne's ball boy was standing there with the ball between his hands, resting it on his head, and he looked at me open-mouthed when I clapped and yelled for him to throw it to me. Maybe he was just distracted, as 14-year-old boys and 8-year-old girls often are, but I thought I was getting homered, that he was purposely stalling me, and I screamed: "Give me the (rhymes with chucking) ball you dumb (12-letter profanity) before I shove my cleat up your (same word for a male donkey)." The kindly ref that had warned me to knock it off was within earshot, and he kindly sent me off the pitch with a red card. Shameful as that sounds, I'd done the same to ball boys throughout my high school career, but was not punished for it before or after.

I'll close by saying this: If you're a soccer player, follow the example set by the members of the CMW and Fallston girl soccer teams, and treat the younger kids roaming the sidelines with some respect. Like the refs, they are performing a thankless task, and don't need you screaming at them.