CHICAGO -- If memory serves, when I was starting on organized high school sports teams, my father saw me play football once, basketball twice and baseball not at all. An otherwise attentive and supportive father, he was like most fathers and mothers of his generation, not at all preoccupied with the games the children played.

Times change and David Murray knows that better than most. “I grew up playing sports in my blue jeans,” he tells me. “Just fun, no parental pressures.”

The youth sports world is now a wild, emotionally jittery and expensive realm.

The proof of that is spread across 180-some pages of his enjoyable, enlightening and charming new book, “Soccer Dad” (Disruption Books), about the journey that Murray and his wife, art teacher Cristie Bosch, took with their daughter Scout.

He writes, “As a soccer family, you aren’t chasing a dream as much as you’re dead asleep, smack in the middle of one — an epic dream, where literally anything could happen next.”

It began very early on, very early. “She was 3 when she got her first pair of soccer ‘cleeks,’ as she pronounced them, and started scuffing the ball around on the turfed floor of a Chicago warehouse in a program for tots, called ‘Lil’ Kickers,’” Murray writes.

The mother of another little girl who was watching the kids kick a soccer ball around said to Murray, “Your daughter is pretty good,” and thus began, as Murray says, “a mad journey that is modern youth sports.”

It is a mad trip but also an enjoyable one, into “the byzantine levels of youth soccer in the city and suburbs.”

And, though the father is the central character in the book, he writes, “Ultimately, how we performed as soccer parents is probably just a measure of how we performed as parents. However well or poorly we did at both, Scout’s mom and I did this together, and I dedicate this book to her.”

There are revelations aplenty, shocks too, and dozens of motel breakfasts, all in search of the holy grail, which, in most cases, is represented by a full scholarship to a Division 1 college or university.

Scout was good, too, and it was not just her parents who would tell you. By the time she was a junior at Lane Tech College Prep, she was wowing people. One of them was reporter/writer Pat McGavin at ChicagolandSoccer.org, which, by the way, will also give you a good glimpse of the local high school soccer scene.

McGavin wrote, “In about six minutes of game action, Murray turned a marquee showdown between two ranked city powers into a one-note affair …(staking) her claim to elite status by scoring three goals during her torrid stretch of the … 3-0 victory.”

Though her parents told Scout that they had saved for her college tuition, trying to remove the pressure of a scholarship off her shoulders, she snagged one anyway at Ohio University, Division 1.

Whew, and her folks could assume their hard work was over. “Now Scout’s mom and I could lean back and relax in the easy-smiling, canvas-chair-toting, school swag-wearing, serenely self-satisfied college soccer parents we remembered imagining we would be,” Murray writes.

No such luck. As Murray tells me, “College was the hardest part, lots of pressure, and the girls calling their moms and dads after every game.”

Murray did not decide to write this book until the soccer journey was near its end. And in it he writes, proudly, that Scout read it in manuscript form. She requested “remarkably few” changes and finally said, “Thanks for writing it, Dad.”

It was formally published April 14, with a cover line of praise from Jonathan Eig, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “King: A Life” and also fine books about other one-name giants such as Ali, Gehrig and Capone: “Wise and funny and wonderful in every way.”

He is right. Murray is a fine writer, a clear thinker and a good dad. He moved here from his native Ohio many years ago and wrote a few stories for the Tribune. He has written for other publications and written a few books; the one before this was 2021’s vastly different “An Effort to Understand: Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half.” He is editor and publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day, a venerable magazine, and is the founder and executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association. He writes daily on communication matters at Writing-Boots.com, which is where Scout has made frequent appearances.

He writes that this book is not a “how to be a soccer parent” manual. And though he does offer an advice-packed last chapter, he admits, “I don’t know how you should go about this. Every parent is different, every kid is different, every family is different, and every dream, if it truly comes from within the heart of the child who’s chasing it, is unique.”

Scout is graduating from college now and will then be back here to attend Roosevelt University, working toward a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling with her aim to be a marriage and family therapist. She will live in student housing and not in her parents’ Ukrainian Village home. She’s a big girl now.

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