Lines

I sprayed the last line on the field and stepped back with a look of concern.

"I...might have messed that one up," I said. Sure, the mark was 12 yards from the goal line, and it was straight enough, but it didn't quite look like it was properly centered. No one would want to take a PK from a crooked angle.

The truth, which I had struggled with non-stop for the past 72 hours, was that the first ever soccer field at Wheeler Middle School was pretty crooked throughout. The angles weren't 90 degrees and the goal lines definitely weren't parallel to each other. It was smaller than regulation and one of the corners was covered in cement-like potholes.

But the way it all came together was actually a masterpiece.

It took over a year of paperwork and meetings (which I'm glad I had no part in), hours upon hours of very patient coaching, and a week of measuring, striping, sneezing, swearing, and assembling to bring the game I love most to the place I love even more. Here we were, about to host our first ever sporting event. Sure, the lines weren't perfectly straight, but when the whistle blew and the kids ran around that field, what I saw was pure perfection. We brought the game of soccer to our school.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 was the day that Wheeler's first soccer field would be created. I would use my background knowledge of field striping- every August of my childhood I helped my dad and his friends stripe the Snoqualmie Valley Youth Soccer Association's fields (by shaking their spray paint cans for them and discarding the empties)- and John Walje and Leighton Nakamoto would join me to finish the job. We had all the right supplies: tape measurers, string, stakes, spray paint, and a field striper. John had a map, Leighton knew construction, and I knew soccer. We thought we were set until we realized that the back field of our campus was not actually as large as it looked. You couldn't fit a regulation field sideways, you couldn't fit one straight up. It took us over an hour to just figure out what direction we wanted it to face. When we finally got that part down, we spent another long period of time measuring our angles using Leighton's Big Island Pythagorean Theory ("Chree, Four, Five"). A lot of the time was spend holding things for Leighton and trying to figure out what he was saying as he hammered in stakes and lined out the string. At one point, as he jogged off to one of the corners with the string and tape measurer, Walje and I looked at each other trying to figure out what he had just told us to do. "That was some heavy pidjin," Walje said. "I heard a lot of 'brahs'."

As time winded down, we finally got all four corners placed and the field was outlined in string. All I had to do was stripe. My trusty helpers took off for the faculty meeting and I found myself alone in the hot sun with a bunch of spray paint and a field striper. It was time to make a field. Maybe it was just the heat and spray fumes talking, but it was a surreal feeling. Here I was, bringing to life The Beautiful Game at my school. Nostalgia overtook me as I flashed back to those warm August evenings under the shadow of Mount Si with my dad striping out all those little soccer fields. Life had come in full circle. My whole being finally had a purpose. I decided I needed to drink some water and stop breathing in spray paint.

My background in sixth grade mathematics told me that the corners hadn't actually turned out to be 90 degrees. A couple had turned out obtuse and a couple had turned out acute. When you stood at a corner and looked at it, it was pretty easy to see. Still, when you stepped back, it looked a lot like a soccer field. The next day, the kids took the field for practice. It still lacked a goal and goal boxes. We had work to do. As the kids practiced, Walje and I searched campus and hauled out almost every piece of the new goal. We had all the main parts, but we were missing a few screws and bolts. We'd have to wait until Friday afternoon to put the goal together and stripe the rest of the field. Everything needed to be set by Saturday. It was coming down to the wire.

On Friday afternoon, my main concern was getting the kids ready for the game. The field itself could wait. Halfway through practice, I looked over at the new goal and saw several WMS staff members- Walje, Leighton, Pollard, one of the janitors, a shop teacher, and a few others- coming together to put the goal up. Had I been in their shoes, on a Friday afternoon with the sun shining, I would have been long gone until Monday morning. But they stuck around, and just like that we had a goal up and ready. After practice Walje, Pollard, and I measured out the goal boxes and striped those as the sun went down. We finished using the flashlights on our cell phones. "See you again, right here, in a few hours," I said in exhaustion.

Saturday morning was a glorious day of clear blue sky. Walje had showed up even earlier than our 7 a.m. meeting time to put out the corner flags and reinforce some of our striping. I finished up the shaky PK lines, and there it was: the completed Wheeler Middle School soccer field. It was beautiful.

Everything came together harmoniously. The fans showed up, the whistle blew, and the games flew by. We scored our first goal of the year on a great penalty kick from just outside the box (partially because we had to make the 18 only 14 yards out) but our opponent ended up coming back and winning 2-1. Ironically, the winning goal was on a PK from the spot I had painted. The poor angle didn't help us after all.

Our first victory of the year would have to wait. But as the kids left the field and we packed up our stuff to leave, I looked over the pitch with a deep sense of pride and joy.

I looked at the lines one more time. Sure, they hadn't been done just right, but they had come together and that's all that mattered. What a great sport, I thought. What a great place.