Photo Essay of the Garden City, Kansas High School Soccer Team

Note: This is the eighth part of my American Soccer Road Trip, which will involve me traveling across the country, finding stories that exemplify the diversity that exists in American soccer. Check back soon for further updates.

The final chapter in Sam Quinones’s book Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream is titled “A Soccer Season in Southwest Kansas.” The book is a study of contemporary Mexican migration, and the last chapter is set in a place that most people don’t associate with immigration. But as immigration patterns are shifting, Mexicans and other Hispanics are settling in places like Garden City, Kansas, far from the communities where such immigrants have typically settled.

Hispanic immigrants are bringing many new things to these communities. Soccer is often a new sport in these areas in which American football, basketball, and baseball have traditionally reigned supreme. Even while soccer has made inroads in American suburbs and cities, its penetration into rural areas has been minimal. As Sam Quinones describes Southwest Kansas, “out here on the High Plains [soccer] was as foreign to the native white residents as the immigrants who played it” (222).

Quinones covers and writes about a season with the Garden City High School soccer team. The team’s success that season has a profound impact on a town struggling to adapt to new demographic realities. Like in Paul Cuadros’s book A Home on the Field, Sam Quinones uses soccer as an avenue to explore social issues relating to the immigrants who play the game. It is a book that soccer fans might not be aware of, but is worth a read at the very least for its chapter on Garden City High School’s team.

After reading this chapter in Sam Quinones’s book, I got in touch with the author and he was kind enough to put me in touch with people in Garden City. I was able to stop in the town as part of my American Soccer Road Trip and talk with them about the team today. Quinones’s book does an excellent job of describing the team and the role of soccer in Garden City, so I chose not to repeat this task, but instead to compile a photo essay of the team. I hope this will add to Quinones’s book and prove interesting to readers of this blog.

* * *

The varsity team at Garden City High School is composed entirely of Hispanic players. The players are mostly Mexican, although some come from Central American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

When the team was in its early days, former player and current assistant coach Anselmo Enríquez told me, other teams would use racial epithets against the players. But, he says, “It’s different now. Maybe some of those teams have Hispanics playing. That’s why they don’t say that kind of stuff.”

Overall, the players on the team seem to enjoy the fraternity their common background and language brings. But some did point out that it was a bit strange only playing with Hispanic players. Junior Horacio Ortiz (below, balancing ball) told me, “It’s kind of weird because we’re almost the only team that has all Hispanics on varsity. Most of the other teams have Chinese people or black people or white people.”

Another player said he had never played with white players and seemed curious about what doing so would be like. “I’ve never played with any Caucasians. I’ve always played with Hispanics. It could be different. Maybe they [are in better] condition.”

This year, the junior varsity team has three white players, the most ever. One of them, Bob Fisher (below, with white shorts), told me that his friends say, “Oh wow, I can’t believe you play soccer.” Peyton Nelson (below, with tank top) said that “everyone just pictures soccer as being a Mexican sport.” Both Fisher and Nelson say they like playing soccer and have stuck with it even as many of their white friends have been pushed toward other sports.

Nelson told me that he’s learned some Spanish and when he doesn’t understand his teammates he “stays close to [his] friends and they’ll translate most of the time.”

The level of interest in Garden City soccer is minimal compared to that shown toward football. As Sam Quinones writes, “the sign of the football team’s status was that it played at the school’s stadium, under the lights with bleachers and a scoreboard. Soccer, meanwhile, played on a nondescript field attached to Kenneth Henderson Middle School a mile away. The field had no scoreboard, no snack bar, no dressing rooms” (240).

Despite the soccer team’s success in the past few years the level of interest in the team at their high school and in the local community has remained small. One player told me that at the high school, people know all of the football players, but might “know one or two players, but not everyone.”

The man most responsible for the team’s success is coach Joaquin Padilla, who is also a guidance counselor at the school. He has worked hard to build the team up from its early days of double-digit losses to its current level. Sam Quinones describes Padilla as a hard-working coach, whose success comes despite many obstacles. The soccer team’s facilities are nowhere near the level of the football team’s; players often miss entire seasons, spending time with family in their home countries; and, much to Padilla’s chagrin, they often do poorly in school and their grades make them ineligible for the team.

On the day I was visiting, Padilla pulled a group of players aside and told them they were in danger of being academically ineligible. It’s a conversation he often has to have even though, he says, “We don’t have a kid here who is not capable of [being eligible].”

Trained in psychology, Padilla talks often about mental obstacles that affect his players’ performance, both on and off the field. He told me that his players often liked to blame their problems (including bad grades) on other people. “I could write a book of excuses.”

Padilla told Sam Quinones that “Mexicans are taught to be submissive. In Mexico, we’re taught not to compete. A lot of those ideas come over here with families” (225).

When I asked Padilla how he defines success, I expected him to talk about on-field achievements. But immediately he told me that success was for his players to graduate from high school and go on to lead better lives than their parents. He doesn’t want his players to go to the meat-packing plants that employ many of their parents; he wants them to strive higher. If the motivation to maintain good grades in order to be eligible to play soccer is what’s needed, Padilla is all for it. “With soccer, if you break your leg, it’s over. But your academics will always help.”

There are undoubtedly many more opportunities to play soccer in Garden City today than there were even a few years ago. Assistant coach Anselmo Enriquez has been working to develop local youth leagues and says that providing opportunities for young kids is gratifying for him because “when I got here from Mexico, there wasn’t that much soccer around here.” The day I was in Garden City, there were kids of diverse backgrounds playing soccer on an adjacent field.

The question is whether these kids will all be playing soccer once they are in high school. Will the non-Hispanic kids be steered toward “American” sports, leaving soccer as a Hispanic sporting enclave? Speaking of non-Hispanic students, Joaquin Padilla says, “I’d like to get them to buy into soccer in middle school.” The challenge, as Sam Quinones concludes his chapter, is “whether the sport should leave the immigrant ghetto in which it resided.”

Just as Hispanic immigrants in Southwest Kansas are working to find their place in local communities, so too is soccer working to find its place in Garden City.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 7:20 pm and is filed under American Soccer Road Trip, Immigration, Latin America, North America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.