This is my dirty little secret: I hate soccer.

I am down to the last of my three children living at home now, and no more chances. One son was built for sports, lean and strong and fast from the day he was born. Of course he hated sports, particularly anything smacking of a team and cooperation and working together. Even individual competition like gymnastics and swimming both bored and terrified him.

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He was, and remains, a person who prefers to create his own rules and win or lose according to private standards. He's got a rock band now, and writes songs like "Guerrilla Love" to growl into the microphone. It's the closest he's come to open gamesmanship in 21 years.

My other son is short and stocky, built for wrestling as few people in the world are. He loved sports, but hated wrestling. He dreamed of height and speed, and in high school played, with varying degrees of ineptitude, football, basketball, track and volleyball. I tried going to games, tried sitting in the bleachers by the football field on dusty autumn days. Unlike many of the other parents, I had no trouble spotting my son in a field of helmets and shoulder pads: He was half the size of the other players, a miniature man in the shadow of looming giants. I counted up my insurance premiums, closed my eyes. But he rarely played, and when he did, he cheated and got benched again. I tried going to basketball games, too, another happy prospect of gold oak floors and squeaking shoes and the echoing bounce of a ball under bright lights. But he was cocky and embarrassed by his poor skill and rude in his embarrassment. Track didn't last long -- too many boring laps of training, I think -- and volleyball barely even began before he quit.

Now he's on a bowling team, and I'm not invited.

My daughter, my strong, fast, short, powerful, shy daughter, loves sports, the concept of sports, the very idea of teams, the notion of cooperation, the possibilities of rules and referees and timekeepers and scores. She shoots hoops in the afternoon at our streetside basket, and sometimes neighbors join her, playing H-O-R-S-E. She bicycles, she runs, she spent her entire seventh-grade lunch hour as the only girl on a flag football team, she swims and snorkels. She loves to move and play. But most of all, she loves soccer.

I hate soccer.

What you must notice in the list of sports above is that one is missing. Nowhere in this litany of childhood games is the glorious word, the very name of spring, the thing we call softball.

I began playing softball late in life, as these things go, when I was 21, living in the counterculture haven of Eugene, Ore., going to the university a little, being a poor single mother a lot, having fun and working hard. I joined a great league made up of a couple dozen teams sponsored by various nonprofit and collective businesses and organizations, a determinedly noncompetitive way to compete with each other. We banned strikeouts, enforced gender ratios, controlled batting rotations, all in the name of letting new and weaker players -- most of them women who'd never played before -- learn and enjoy the game. It was weird and fun and surprisingly successful, with practices several times a week and games every Sunday for almost six months of the year. There was a huge elimination tournament at season's end.

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