In the spirit of the holiday, I give thanks to some of the coaches who have during the last year shared insight I believe valuable to coaches and parents. Happy Thanksgiving!

San Francisco is known for many things: The Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz; sourdough bread and Dungeness crab; cable cars and Victorian houses; the Giants and 49ers. Soccer? Not so much.

Game control of this boys under-19 game was becoming dicey with increasing dissent as we approached the midway point of the second half. I had several years of referee experience back then and this being New York in the mid-1980s, I was refereeing the game by myself with no assistant referees, just club linesmen.

The U.S. national team career of Brandi Chastain, most famous for her title-clinching penalty kick at the 1999 Women's World Cup, spanned from 1988 to 2004 and included 1996 and 2004 Olympic gold medals. Her coaching career, at the youth level and as assistant coach to her husband, Jerry Smith, at Santa Clara University, began while still an active player.

Ages ago, I was assigned a men's amateur cup match between two teams who had played one another in a league match the Sunday before. As the league game had just concluded, two players got into a fistfight and they were eventually separated but the ref did not take send off the players for violent conduct. Not surprisingly, that ref did not have a long career.