The Glass Grass: What Youth Soccer Taught Me About the Barriers Black Families Face in Schools

I have been thinking a lot lately about the parallels between youth sports and schools in the United States. As we enter World Cup season, I keep coming back to our family’s journey with soccer and how it connects to the work I do as an educator.

My son is a rising junior and soccer player at Catholic University in Washington, DC. The journey to get him there has been a roller coaster of emotional, physical, and mental joys and pains, with a whole lot of everything in between.

As an educator, I’ve always been a connector. I look for the threads between people, experiences, and ideas that make sense together, and especially the ones that don’t. What analogies and metaphors help a specific audience see something differently? I’ve been asking that question since my son was six years old playing for a local recreational team. Yellow cards were shown to my son when others received warnings. When he was fouled, no call came. The way parents from the opposing team ridiculed our players felt like more than friendly rivalry. From those early Saturday mornings, something about the youth soccer experience felt off. Not just because we were often the minority on the pitch. Something deeper. Something structural. 

I started calling it the Glass Grass: a concept borrowed directly from the Glass Ceiling, that invisible barrier women have long pressed against in corporate spaces, able to see the top but blocked from reaching it by forces never written in any policy or handbook. The Glass Grass works the same way, just lower to the ground. It sits between families like ours and the real opportunities embedded within the sport. You can see the field. Your kid is on it. But there is a layer of access, built on relationships, information, and unspoken rules, that some families move through freely while others press against it and never quite understand why they can’t get to the other side.

The families with more resources, more money and more time, consistently watched their kids gain access to more opportunities. The players receiving those opportunities were not necessarily faster, stronger, or more talented, but their parents were always present, always watching practice, always pulling the coach aside afterward. They had private, informal relationships with coaches and organizational leaders that the rest of us didn’t know existed until it was often too late to build them.

I felt those patterns in my gut early on. But it wasn’t until I started seeing the direct parallels between how sports organizations and schools operated that I understood what I was actually witnessing. My gut feelings were grounded in something real: a history of privilege that was harder for our family to access, and a system that was never designed with us in mind.

Misplaced Frustration and Hard Accountability

That realization came with some hard accountability. The frustration I felt got misplaced. I said things to my son like “You have to try harder” and “Don’t let these kids make you feel less than.” Those words came from a fearful place of deficit, but they were aimed at the wrong target. I should have been directing that energy toward the coaches and organizational leaders who consistently overlooked my son and kids who shared his identity. The access points to opportunity were hidden, and it looked like only certain families had been given the map.

Around the time my son turned 13, the gut feeling sharpened into something I couldn’t ignore. I started connecting what was happening in sports to what was happening in schools: the over-emphasis on behavior, the underrecognition of success, the lack of meaningful communication with families like ours. It wasn’t until I began working in the family engagement space in education that I realized our experience wasn’t unique. Families of color across the country carry the same story. That’s when the lightbulb clicked. Our family was being impacted by systems that were never designed to naturally engage with us. Many school leaders, and many sports organizations, were not trained or equipped to build genuine relationships with Black families, families where English isn’t a first language, or families with less economic and social capital. And on the flip side, families who were underrepresented in those systems were never given the tools to navigate them either.

The Glass Grass Doesn’t Just Live on the Soccer Field

The Glass Grass shows up in school hallways, at IEP meetings, at back-to-school nights where some parents are greeted like insiders and others are handed a flyer and pointed to a seat. The barrier is the same. The families pressing against it are often the same. And the organizations that built the field rarely acknowledge or simply don’t know it exists.

Any time I am in front of a group of teachers, educators, or leaders, I carry the weight of our experiences in hopes of demonstrating how effective communication and an awareness of our unconscious bias can redirect the trajectory of students. The Glass Grass is not just a sports metaphor. It is a systems diagnosis.

This Is Exactly Why Coaction Collective Exists

The difference between families who can navigate systems and families who can’t is not about effort or how much they care about their kids. It is about access. It is about whether anyone ever pulled you aside and explained how it actually works, who the real decision makers are, and what it takes to be seen as a partner rather than a problem.

At Coaction Collective, we help schools and organizations as well as families build that bridge on purpose, Not through one-off workshops or feel-good events, but through sustainable structures that position families as genuine partners and co-designers in the work, not just recipients of information.

My son made it to Catholic University and excels academically and on the pitch. He is out there competing at the collegiate level and I am proud of every step of that journey. But I carry every kid who got overlooked, and every parent who never received the information they needed to advocate, navigate, or simply feel like they belonged in the room. That weight shapes how I show up within Coaction Collective and and it won't let me rest until the families pressing against that glass can finally feel the grass beneath their feet.