My son's team made it through the preliminaries in Lafayette last weekend because they beat Shreveport 5-0 and then lost to Lafayette 0-2, and the tournament is based on points, and many teams had head-to-head games.

They played well against Shreveport, not-so-well against Lafayette. And toward the end of the game, one of the Lafayette players who must've been trash talking with Andrew said, "At least I have a house," which stopped everyone on our team who heard it in their tracks. Including Malcolm who went charging down the sideline to let the ref know what'd been said.

Andrew walked over to the Lafayette parents and pointed to the Lakeview name stitched on his jersey and said, "Do you know what this name means? We only have 3 kids on our team who didn't lose their homes. They had eight feet of water." Pretty strong. Then he said, "We live in trailers now, like you." Not good. Then, one of our players supposedly spit at the kid who'd made the house comment and he got a red card. The ref took the comment-kid out of the game but didn't give him a red card. That kid came over to Lakeview's bench at the end of the game to apologize, but the hurt is done. I think that embedded in his hateful comment is what many people feel about New Orleans and St. Bernard parish and the aftermath, which is not much, anymore, which is we're tired of hearing about your trouble, which is, it didn't happen to us.

Andrew's team is the defending state champion, but they've only won a few games this season. Our kids are easy to piss off, mouthy, ready to fight; some don't want to work at practice, or go to practice. The team is coached by a dedicated, young Danish coach who emigrated to the US to play in college, and he doesn't know what to do about the ready-anger, and what seems like a lack of respect for the game. (He lost his house, too.) All season they've been playing with 12-13 players, so he can't use the bench as leverage. I think I, dumbly, thought this would be a "Ru-dee! Ru-dee!" kind of season, with the flooded-out kids walking out of the water, heads high, kicking ass on the field to keep their title. But so far, it's not been like that. We'll see what happens this weekend when Lakeview goes to state cup.