I am in my third season coaching my daughter’s travel softball team. For two and a half years, the girls on my team, most of whom are now 10 years old, never cared about my work or talking about soccer with me. They left it to their father.
And something has changed in the last six months. All of a sudden, I was coaching a team that had a lot of Chiefs fans.
Call it the Taylor Swift effect.
If you’re the parent of a young girl, you can probably relate to your daughter’s sudden obsession with football, or at least watching one team, the Chiefs.
Even if you didn’t experience Taylor Swift’s Elas tour last summer, you’ve at least read about the craze it sparked. Shortly after, it was revealed that Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce was dating Swift, and she began showing up to his games in September.
At that time, I noticed a change in the girls on the team. The practice took place the day after the Chiefs defeated the Jets on “Sunday Night Football” in September. At the end of practice, I told the girls that Coach Brian was in the same building as Taylor Swift the night before.
They started screaming and asking questions about how close I got to her and what she looked like, and then Piper, the diminutive second baseman/outfielder, said, “What did she smell like?” hit me. I explained to Piper that if Coach Brian tried to sniff out Swift, Coach Brian would be in jail right now.
This continues at home with my daughter Alexa, who keeps asking when the Chiefs game is and wants to watch it with me.
As any parent knows, if your child wants to spend time with you after reaching a certain age, that’s a gift. Alexa and the other girls may not be interested in Steve Spagnuolo’s electric package. They certainly haven’t heard of Len Dawson or Christian Okoye. But it doesn’t matter if your daughter wants to watch a little soccer with you right now, just to catch a glimpse of Swift cheering on Kelce in her luxury suite.
This is my rebuttal to those who are fed up with networks showing Swift every few minutes on air, or who claim she is somehow ruining the NFL. Can seeing Swift sitting in a luxurious suite really take you away from the game? Unless you have a daughter at home who wants to watch the game.
I don’t know if Swift is creating lifelong Chiefs fans. She wonders if she and Kelce break up, they might move on to a new phase (she hears her breakup album will be epic). But for now, she’s bringing new viewers to the NFL, and maybe they’ll stick around. Who can complain about that? This is also a demographic that is not known for loving soccer.
For most of us, there’s a reason why we fell in love with soccer and our favorite team. Don’t think it was their offensive scheme that appealed to him when he was 7 or 8. It could be the lightning bolt on the Chargers helmet, the black and gold of the Steelers uniforms, or something you see in an NFL movie. Think of Swift as an extension of that and a reason for young girls to become fans.
Our softball team holds winter training on Sunday nights in January and February. During the divisional round, I heard from several parents whose daughters wanted to stay home and watch the Chiefs vs. Bills game to get a glimpse of the Swifts. On Sunday, the Chiefs game ended about an hour before our training started. When I entered the room, Leela, the hard-hitting third baseman, couldn’t wait to tell me that the Chiefs had won the game.
A while later, the girls were singing a Swift song and debating whether they wanted to play the Chiefs, 49ers, or Lions. When I told my team I was going to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl, several of the players asked me to get an autograph or take a picture.
Of course, Piper asked me to check out Swift’s scent. If I went to jail in Las Vegas, you’d know what happened.
