If I had to choose one word to describe Kosuke Kimura, it would have to be determined. The Colorado Rapids midfielder would not be where he is today were it not for his determination. From a young age, he knew he wanted to be a professional player, but at times it seemed such a goal would be impossible to attain. He has achieved his goal, although far from Japan, the country where he grew up. But determined as Kimura is, he is unwilling to rest on his laurels, and now has new goals for himself as a player.

Kosuke Kimura (photo: Colorado Rapids/MLS)

I knew of Kosuke Kimura because he is the only Japanese player in MLS. The league has said that it wants to attract Japanese players, but has yet to do so (my own hypothesis is that Japanese players aren’t that interested because the level of play is not much higher than the J-League and the pay is often lower). MLS didn’t attract Kimura to the league; he found it through his own roundabout career path. He sat down recently in Denver to talk about how he got to the US and differences he sees between American and Japanese soccer.

Kimura realized when he was in elementary school that he had quite a talent for soccer. But he did not have connections to professional teams that lead many similarly talented youngsters to spots on J-League youth teams. In middle school, he heard about an open tryout at his local team, Kawasaki Frontale. Of the nearly five hundred players there, the team announced they would select only three for their youth program. At the end of the tryout, Kimura heard his name called. It was an incredible boost to his confidence. He said of that day, “I felt like I had something. I felt like I could make it.”

Kimura began training with the youth team at Frontale and did so well that at age 15, he began practicing with the first team. Everything was going smoothly until, in his last year of high school, he broke his fifth metatarsal. Kimura recovered, but couldn’t return to his previous level of play and Frontale released him. It was a huge setback, and one that might have dissuaded Kimura from pursuing his goal of playing professionally. But it didn’t.

The other option for Kimura at that point was to play college soccer in Japan. But, he told me, “The problem is, in Japan, usually people go pro after high school. Only a few people go pro after college.” Kimura had a friend who told him that in the US, college players often did turn pro. His friend had recently received a scholarship to play in the US and urged Kimura to do the same.

The idea of playing college soccer in the US was appealing, but posed a major problem: Kimura spoke almost no English. He used the little English he had to research schools and write to college coaches. He got some responses, but none offered scholarships. Several offered to have him come to open tryouts, including the coach at Western Illinois University. He spoke to the coach there, who told him he could come but only if he attended an ESL (English as a Second Language) class that began in two weeks. Fourteen days later, Kimura boarded a plane for the US.

After his ESL class, Kimura was immediately thrown into regular college classes, which he found difficult. The first semester, he said, “I had no idea what the teachers were talking about.” Dealing with difficult academic material in a new language, he had to work twice as hard as his classmates.

On the soccer field, however, things went much more smoothly. He went to the college team’s tryout with a Kuwaiti he had met in his ESL class and both thoroughly impressed the coach. After the first practice, the coach came up to the players and said, “You guys have to come. You guys have to help us.”

And help they did. The team won their conference championship three out of the next four years and made the prestigious end-of-year NCAA tournament. Not coincidentally, Kimura was named to the All-Conference after three of his four seasons with the team. Upon his graduation, Kimura’s coach said of Kimura, “he has been an inspiration to his teammates over the last four years.”

Kosuke Kimura playing at Western Illinois University (photo: AJ Self/Western Courier)

Despite his stellar college career, it was a bit of a surprise when the midfielder found out he had been drafted by the Colorado Rapids. His college team had never gone very far in the NCAA Tournament, and he assumed this would put a damper on his hopes of going pro. But the Rapids saw enough of Kimura to offer him a spot on their team.

Since coming here four years ago, Kimura has come to appreciate many aspects of playing soccer in the US. Here, he said, he gets along well with all of his teammates, whom he finds very open. “It’s much easier to interact with teammates here.”

He contrasted that openness with what he saw in Japan. There, Kimura found that Japanese society’s emphasis on hierarchy (see this discussion of sempai / kohai) hampered relationships between teammates. “In Japan, it’s hard to break down the relationships … When I was in junior high school or high school, I didn’t talk to older people. If they wanted to talk to me, I talked to them, but I never tried to talk to them.”

Kimura has also noticed differences in the style of play that characterizes Japanese and American soccer. The J-League is “much faster” with more “skill and technique” while MLS “is more mixed … It combines the skill and physical [strength].” Kimura posited that MLS’s style of play is due to its drawing players from all around the world.

He also suggested that the difference can be partly accounted for in the different ways youth players are coached in the two countries. “When I was a kid in Japan, they focused on little details. When I was little, my coach only focused on skills.” In coaching he’s done in the US, Kimura says he’s often been shocked at the poor level of skills he has observed.

(Were I to explain this difference, I would point to Japanese society’s emphasis on perfecting the proper process of doing things. Often seen in martial arts training, Japanese society traditionally encourages a mastering of process, or kata, through repetition. In my work in a Japanese middle school, I observed this emphasis on mastery of process through repetition and noticed how different it was from the typical American ideal of learning through exploration and expression of creativity. The constant repetition of Japanese education that encourages children to repeatedly work to improve their skill would undoubtedly make more skillful players, though one might wonder if they would lack creativity. That said, Celtic’s Shunsuke Nakamura ain’t bad.)

Critiques of American youth coaching aside, Kimura is happy to be playing in the US. He’s far from home, but “right now, I want to stay outside of Japan and try to move on with different soccer. I want to get more experience and work hard towards the future.”

Kosuke Kimura playing for the Rapids reserve team (photo: Mark Leffingwell/Daily Camera)

Kimura has achieved his goal of becoming a professional player, albeit far from Japan, but Kimura is now aiming higher. “Whatever I do, I try to follow plans,” Kimura told me. “For now, my short term goal is to make it to the first team and play. It’s going to be hard because we have so many older, good players and this is only my first year. After that, something will open up for me. I have to play for the first team first and maybe some people will see me and I’ll have another chance … Eventually, the ultimate goal is to play for the Japanese national team.”

Right now, Kosuke Kimura is a long way from that ultimate goal. But given the determination he’s shown throughout his career, he might just reach it.

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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.

In 1977, when Peter Vermes was 11 years old, his father took him to see a World Cup qualifier in his homeland between the Hungarian national team and the USSR. The young boy was in awe of the stadium and the players out on the field. He told his father, “One day I’m going to play in this stadium. I’m going to play for the United States and we’re going to play against Hungary.”

Vermes’s desire to play for the US against Hungary reflected his family’s background. He was born in Delran, New Jersey in 1966 to Hungarian parents. His father, Michael, had been a professional player, a member of the great Budapest Honved FC team in the 1950s. Things were on course for the elder Vermes to play in the 1958 World Cup, but the Soviet invasion of 1956 forced him to flee his homeland. He eventually settled in the United States, although he would later return most summers to Hungary with Peter, seeking to instill a connection to his homeland in his young son.

The elder Vermes also taught his son the game of soccer at which he had been so skilled. Peter was a star college player at Rutgers in the late 1980s and began playing with the Olympic team as it prepared for the 1988 Seoul games. While at a pre-Olympic tournament in Lille, France, Vermes was approached after a game by a man speaking Hungarian. “[He] asked if I spoke Hungarian and I said yes … He asked me if I had any aspirations of coming to Europe and I said yes.”

Peter Vermes (photo: sporting-heroes.net)

The man, it turned out, was an agent and said that he could set up trials with European teams for Vermes. The agent said he would set up a trial with Belgium’s Standard Liege (the club where American defender Oguchi Onyewu plays today), but first Vermes should go to Hungary to train for a couple of weeks and get up to speed on the European game. The agent had contacts with a team called Raba ETO (known today as Gyori ETO FC) and so Vermes began training with them.

Instant impact doesn’t even begin to explain what Peter Vermes did in his first day of training with Raba ETO. He was placed on the reserve team in a scrimmage against the first team.

Five minutes in, the first team scored against us. Five minutes later, I scored to tie the game up. The coach, after the goal was scored, put me on the first team. Within ten minutes of that, I scored a goal for the first team and we won 2-1 … They stopped the game, we all went inside, and they offered me a contract right then and there.

Vermes talked it over with his father and they decided that it made sense for him to sign with the Hungarian team. He could play there for a year or two to gain experience and then move to a bigger league in Europe. Vermes signed with Raba ETO in 1989 and became the first American to play first division soccer over a whole season.

In signing a contract with a Hungarian team, Vermes was also going behind the Iron Curtain. He had chosen to play with a Hungarian team, at a time when Hungary was still under communist rule. What did it feel like, I asked, to be an American in Hungary at that time?

“Someone who had never been there before would have looked at it with different eyes,” Vermes told me. Having been there nearly every summer as a kid, he knew what he was getting into.

The manifestations of the country’s economic system were relatively limited, Vermes has said. He is quoted in David Wangerin’s book Soccer in a Football World as saying, “I know there is communism there, but it’s not something I notice in my everyday activities. What I notice more is how much more culture and tradition there is … everywhere you go to eat, there are violins playing.”

That is not to say that communism was completely invisible to Vermes while he was playing in Hungary. While contact between capitalist and communist nations was often minimal, the American Vermes got up close and personal with many Russians.

We would play on Saturdays and we would get Sundays off. Saturday night after the game, I would usually take the train to Budapest because I had a lot of relatives there. When I would get on the train, a lot of the Russian soldiers would travel [into Budapest] when they would get a day or weekend [off]. I would end up being on a train with a bunch of Russian soldiers.

Vermes said he almost always felt perfectly safe in Russian-occupied Hungary. But one night, driving home from dinner, he got quite a fright:

I was driving home and all of the sudden … out of nowhere fifty yards ahead of me, a Russian tank came out into the street and it was heading straight toward me. And I’m like, “Holy s***, what am I going to do here?” All of the sudden, [the tank] turned down another street.

The tank’s trip through the city tore up the streets and it was one incident among many that led Hungarians to take a dim view of their Russian occupiers. Even though he was in a communist country, Vermes told me, he noticed Hungarians’ unhappiness about their occupiers and rebelliousness which would lead the country to freedom shortly after he left (he moved on to FC Volendam in Holland after one season with Raba ETO)

Like many of the American “pioneers” of his era (he mentioned Tab Ramos, John Harkes, and John Doyle), Vermes had to go abroad to earn a living, and doing so was a transformative experience for him. He told me that it “hardened [him] as a player” and taught him how to be a professional.

Right before the 1990 World Cup, Peter Vermes achieved a long held goal. With his father in attendance, he represented the United States in a game against Hungary played at the same stadium he had been to as a child.

Peter Vermes (in blue) playing for the US national team (photo: BBC)

That summer, Vermes achieved a goal his father had long ago dreamed for himself: playing in the World Cup itself. Even though the US lost all three of its matches in Italy that summer, Vermes was simply proud to have played in the tournament. And his father was just as proud of his son. Vermes told me of his father:

I think for him it was full circle. He was a professional player, he played in Hungary. He had to leave because communism was coming in, he had to escape the country and cut his career short. And then here I was, his son, who eventually become a professional player, and was playing in Hungary, his old country that he wanted to play for some day and probably would have if he had stayed. And then finally, his son was going to a World Cup. … [M]aybe he couldn’t finish off his career but he saw it happening for me and I think he was extremely proud of that fact.

Frank Borghi is a gentle giant. When he opened the door to let me in his house in St. Louis, I was struck by his height – well over six feet tall – and the size of his hands, which enveloped mine. But any thoughts that he might be an intimidating man were quickly put to rest as Borghi sat down with me to discuss his career in soccer.

He is a jovial and friendly man, the type of kind grandfather every kid hopes for. But unlike most grandfathers, the stories Borghi can tell of his youth include being the goalkeeper who kept England at bay in United States’ famous 1-0 victory at the 1950 World Cup.Frank Borghi was born in the soccer-mad city of St. Louis. He grew up in the Italian neighborhood called The Hill, where soccer was particularly popular. But initially the young Borghi was drawn more to baseball. He was good enough to receive a professional contract, and he played minor league baseball for two years (after the second year, a team official came to his house to offer Borghi a contract extension, but his mother chased him away, saying she wanted her boy to stay home).

Borghi continued to play baseball for fun, but decided he needed another pastime to keep himself busy during the winter off-season. At the time, soccer was a winter sport in the US and so Borghi decided to give it a try. There was only one problem: he couldn’t kick a ball. He told me: “I started out playing on the field, but I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t handle the ball. So I knew I could catch a ball so I signed up to play in goal. I knew I could do that.”

Putting the hand-eye coordination he had learned playing baseball to use proved a stroke of genius and before long Borghi had become one of the top goalkeepers in the country. (He never did learn to kick, however, and said later, “If I kicked it, the ball would go up and come back down straight.” As a result, Borghi always threw the ball out after making a save and had teammates take goal kicks for him.)

Frank Borghi (photo: The Soccer Garage)

Borghi played most of his career for the Simpkins-Ford team and proved so successful that he was called up to the national team for 1950 World Cup qualifiers. He played well enough to retain his place with the team and flew down to Brazil for the tournament.The US had been drawn into a group along with Spain, Chile, and England. Borghi feared the English most of all. They were, he told me, the “fathers of soccer” and favorites to win the tournament. The US team were anything but, and going into the match, Borghi said he was hoping to avoid a slaughter and only wanted to “keep [the score] down to four or five goals.”

When Joe Gaetjens scored in the 37th minute, Borghi was as surprised as anyone. Immediately, he began to think of the onslaught that the England team would bring upon his goal during the time that remained in the match. Borghi said to himself, “Oh my god, the roof is going to cave in.”

The onslaught came as promised and the English team hit the woodwork four times in the match. Many of their other opportunities were stopped by an inspired Frank Borghi. His teammate Harry Keough described one save to William Gildea of the Washington Post in 1994:

When Borghi dove for the ball, he dove straight to his right. With his right hand, he reached back maybe 10 or 12 inches and his hand bent toward the goal. It looked from where the English were that it had crossed the line. But Borghi was a yard or so off the goal line. It was a good thing.

When I asked Borghi himself about the many saves he made that day, he shrugged and said simply, “I had the opportunity.”

Photo: Baudo Family / USA Today / National Soccer Hall of Fame

Self-deprecating about his kicking ability and quick to play down the saves he made in what was the game of his life, Borghi is nothing if not humble. The closest he came to promoting himself was when he told me “I had confidence in my hands” (and it’s a good thing, too: Borghi never wore gloves).

The US’ 1-0 victory over England remains one of the team’s most famous wins of all time (a movie called The Game of Their Lives was made about it). Despite the disappointment of losing to an unheralded American team, Borghi said that their English opponents were cordial when they met in the airport after the match.

A few years later, England great Stanley Matthews (who was on the bench that day, as the English didn’t think they’d need him against the lowly Americans) was in St. Louis and Borghi met with him. After their meeting, Borghi told me that the England legend signed a card for him, putting his full title “Sir Stanley Matthews.” Borghi chuckled, recalling what happened next: “So I signed a card for him ‘Sir Frank Borghi.’”

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Kudos to anyone who knows who I am sitting next to in the picture. Hint: he played in a very important match for the US national team, though one that very few Americans were aware of at the time it was played.

More on this man and my conversation with him coming soon, but right now, can you tell me who he is?

Tom Dunmore got to go to his first match the way young children get most things they desire – by pestering their parents until they give in. Dunmore had long wanted to see his team, Brighton Hove and Albion, play, and when his mother finally bought him tickets to a match, it turned out to be, he says, the most exciting game of his life.

The tickets Dunmore’s mother had bought were the cheapest available and didn’t provide much of a view, especially for young Tom. Fortunately, the stewards took him, and many other kids, down close to the field, where they could see the match.

Brighton fans at their previous stadium, the Goldstone Ground (photo: View Images)

Late in the match, when Dean Wilkins hit a 25-yard free kick to win it for Brighton, Dunmore and all the other youngsters in the stadium had the best view in the entire stadium. The place went crazy, Dunmore recalls, and prompted a massive pitch invasion. Because the children were right next to the field, they had to be first onto the pitch, and Dunmore recalls fondly being in awe of the experience of rushing the field. (Meanwhile, back on the terraces, his mother was worrying about her child, but Dunmore says, “it didn’t cross my mind that she’d be worried.”)

This early fascination with the pitch invasion has continued to the present day, and provided the inspiration and name for Tom’s informative and entertaining blog on football fan culture. Pitch invasions, Dunmore says, tell so much about the sport of soccer. They have been used as mechanisms of protest (Brighton fans invaded the pitch in 1996 to protest their Goldstone ground being sold) and lack of security in stadiums has often led to forced pitch invasions. Today, of course, they are relatively rare, which Dunmore sees as symbolic of a Premier League that has completely sanitized.

Reading fans invade the pitch in 2006 (photo: ComEnts)

Tom Dunmore came to the US several years ago for graduate school and has remained here ever since. During the past year, he has become a fan of his new local team, the Chicago Fire, and has been documenting his experience for The Offside blog. I passed through Chicago recently as part of my American Soccer Road Trip and spoke with Dunmore about similarities and differences between English and American soccer.

Dunmore told me that when he first came to the US, he barely knew MLS existed. Like many English expats, he continued to follow soccer from his homeland, which he found surprisingly easy to do on TV and through the Internet. He went to a few Fire games the next year, but didn’t really begin to follow the league until the last year or so. Dunmore says that he began to follow the Fire because he missed having a local team to support.

One of Dunmore’s initial impressions of American soccer was that many more families attended games. Though he had attended his first match with his mom, it wasn’t common when he grew up for families to go to games together in England, but in the US much of the marketing was clearly aimed at this demographic. Dunmore notes the many gimmicks he’s seen geared toward families, including silly halftime entertainment and shooting t-shirts into the crowd (something which, he notes, does seem to excite some fans more than the match itself). The Fire’s attempts to sponsor Faith and Family Night and Retro Night (a total of six fans, he says, got the message to turn out in 70s and 80s clothes) are embarrassing to actual fans, Dunmore says. He was slightly disgusted by it all, but “[tried] not to pay attention to whatever the hell they’re doing.”

Apparently, cheerleaders like Columbus’s Crewzers attract families (photo: About.com)

It’s a much more sanitized stadium-going experience than Dunmore was used to. As a kid in Brighton, he says, “going to the bathroom was a dangerous expedition.” Dunmore is surprised that they can sell beer in American stadiums, but acknowledges that the lack of a hooligan problem in the US makes this possible.

Lest you think Dunmore is a soccer – pardon me, football – snob, he has nothing but good things to say about the hardcore Chicago fans, known as a group by the area where they sit, Section 8. Dunmore particularly likes the multicultural nature of the fans, and the way they blend their styles of support. He cites the mish-mash of English chants, songs in Spanish, and Italian-inspired tifo. The Section 8 fans, Dunmore says, are incredibly dedicated, and he cites the example of the 200 or so who drove 1,110 miles (and crossed an international border) for a match against Toronto FC.

Fans in Chicago’s Section 8 (photo: Big Soccer)

Dunmore has also been impressed by Americans’ knowledge of world soccer. The number of American soccer fans may be relatively limited, but those who do follow the game know a lot about it. Dunmore says that many English fans are very knowledgeable about their own country’s many divisions, but know little about leagues around the world. American fans he’s met, aided by the extensive television coverage on channels like Fox Soccer Channel, GolTV, and Setanta, watch games from all over the world, and are familiar with a wider variety of leagues and players.

Dunmore thinks that American soccer can teach lessons to the game’s inventors. He loves the fact that fans are allowed to stand at American stadiums, something he says is “missing from the top two divisions in England” (all-seater stadiums were put into place in the wake up the Hillsborough disaster, and the English have been loathe to reconsider the policy of outlawing terracing despite its safe use today in countries such as Germany). Dunmore also appreciates the reasonable ticket prices at Fire games. In some ways, Dunmore tells me, MLS reminds him of lower league English games he attended as a child some 20 years ago.

Dunmore sees potential in MLS and hopes it continues to make strides forward. He applauds the Fire’s signing of Cuauhtemoc Blanco and notes that it has attracted many Mexican fans to games who hadn’t come before (the neighborhood where he lives is 90% Hispanic, yet interest until recently in MLS was minimal there). He tells me that “hopefully when [Hispanic fans] come out, they will become MLS fans, not just Blanco or Club America fans.”

Cuauhtemoc Blanco is popular with Mexican fans, and with himself as well (photo: Milenio / Brian Kersey / AP)

The possibility of increasing the numbers of Hispanic fans at Fire games excites Dunmore, not least because they will help to improve the stadium atmosphere. And ultimately, he says, the atmosphere is what draws him to the stadium. He suspects a better atmosphere will bring in other fans, even those less interested in soccer, as well. Dunmore notes that American college football and basketball are so popular in part because of the fantastic atmosphere fans in the stadiums create. He hopes MLS will market less to soccer moms and their families, and more to fans already knowledgeable about the sport, who are more likely to improve the atmosphere for all fans.

Throughout Dunmore’s life, he’s always been more passionate about supporting his local teams than the larger, more prestigious clubs. There’s something about a live game, he says, that can’t be matched on TV. “It’s fine if people want to support Manchester United or Chelsea, but they should also support local teams, “ he tells me. “If the world was composed of Manchester United or Chelsea, they could play each other to death, but it wouldn’t be interesting.”

The following tombstone was in the cemetery next to the church. A relative of Sir Alex, perhaps?

The United States is one of the few countries in which serious athletic competition takes place within its institutions of higher education. The combination of sports and school that most people are familiar with is big-time, Division 1 American football and basketball teams. Especially in the top programs, players see their time playing in college as a stepping-stone to a professional career, and it is an open secret that many such athletes rarely study, if they do at all.

The title student-athlete is often used to refer to such players, but it is truly a misnomer. To find true student-athletes, you have to leave the huge campuses of Ohio State, the University of Texas, UCLA, and the like, and go to Division III schools. The athletes at such schools are there for education first and play sports simply for fun. With enrollments that number a fraction of those at large universities and a relatively less serious approach to sports, such Division III institutions are often ignored.

Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana is such a Division III school (it’s also my alma mater and where I played soccer in 1998 and 1999). A Quaker school founded in 1847, it has established a strong reputation among liberal arts colleges. Earlham fields a variety of sports teams, none of which have a particularly strong record of success.

For the past 27 years, the coach of Earlham’s men’s soccer team has been Roy Messer. In his time at Earlham, Messer has had plenty of time to reflect on the role his teams play in the college community. He sat down with me recently and talked about the uniquely American way of mixing athletics and academics, and the role of soccer at a college like Earlham.

Roy Messer (front left) accepting an award in 2005 for his 25 years as head coach of Earlham College (photo: Earlham College)

Messer grew up in the soccer hotbed of Kearny, New Jersey. His first haircut, Messer family legend has it, was at the hands of former American international goalkeeper Tony Meola’s father (a goalkeeper himself, Messer says that he is “no better than the second best goalkeeper from Kearny”). The ethnic community made soccer a popular sport in Kearny. The annual game between Kearny Scots and Kearny Irish, Messer recalls, was an occasion for “widespread drunkenness – and that was just the players.” The local passion for the game meant that Kearny kids grew up playing soccer, even though the sport had yet to become popular in other parts of the country.He later played at Wooster College in Ohio and after graduation took up coaching. When longtime Earlham coach Charlie Matlack retired, Messer was hired. That was in 1980 and he has remained in his position ever since.

Initially, Messer says, most of his players came from the East Coast or boarding and private schools where soccer had already gained a foothold in the US. As soccer took hold across the country, Messer was able to shift his recruiting to more diverse high schools. Messer says that, “you couldn’t have fielded a reasonable team with Indiana players in the early 1980s, whereas today you have a lot of good players from Indiana.”

During the early years of Messer’s tenure at Earlham soccer was growing increasingly popular, but in a very uneven way. Soccer become the sport many suburban kids were growing up playing, but not kids elsewhere. The sport, Messer says, became a “socioeconomic juggernaut.”

Messer has many contacts in England, and they are often surprised to learn who plays soccer in the US. “I’ve described to English friends the social origins or many players [at Earlham],” says Messer. “Their jaws drop because that’s not who plays soccer [in England]. They’d be playing rugby, if not tennis or golf.”

Much of the social stratification seen in those who play soccer play and those who don’t has to do with the structure of American youth sports. As opposed to countries with professional teams who sign players to youth contracts at young ages, American children wanting to play on elite teams must pay for the privilege of doing so. Messer notes that “[Youth] clubs that are huge economic concerns. They’re fueled by parents’ fees.” The Earlham coach contrasts this with what the situation in England, and says that his English friends fear such a system would scare off many potential players.

The team Messer has fielded today, though, is far more diverse than most college teams. (At a recent match, boisterous Earlham fans noted that every single player on the opposing team was from Ohio. They shouted out each player’s name and then yelled “Ohio,” before lauding their team for its diversity by chanting “Let’s get fired up (clap, clap, clap, clap, clap) fired up for regional diversity.”)

Fans show up in good numbers to watch Earlham play

Earlham players come from states as far away as Maryland, Washington, and New Jersey, and countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Uganda. Messer tells me with pride that, “If you look at our team, I would say we are far more diverse than the college in general.” For a school like Earlham that prides itself on its diversity, it’s a point well taken.

Messer tells me that the team is valuable to the college community in many ways. In addition to increasing diversity, it gives people a chance to see the amorphous entity that is Earlham College made real. Games, Messer says, are “a point where people come together. At times, Earlham doesn’t really exist. But when an athletic team takes the field, there is an identifiable Earlham. That’s one way that Earlham comes to exist as a place.”

Earlham fans relish the opportunity to support their team. The team draws quite large crowds for such a small school, and the fans punch far above their weight with their creativity in supporting the team. Some of the most dedicated fans have created a “hymnal” that collects favorite chants, the most funny of which riff on the school being Quaker, and thus pacifist. One chant goes: “Fight, fight, inner light, kill Quakers kill. Knock them down, beat them senseless, do it till we reach consensus.”

The fan support has come despite much success in recent years. Earlham’s teams have had several losing seasons in a row, but coach Roy Messer remains upbeat. Success, for him, “is not winning everything because that’s not realistic. The way I explain Earlham is that … we’re not Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea or Arsenal. We’re Portsmouth or Bolton.” He pauses to look around for his assistant coach, who is a Sunderland supporter. When it’s clear he is not there, Messer continues: “It’s a good thing Rob’s not here so I can say, ‘I hope we’re not Sunderland.’”

The day I’m there, Earlham is playing Capital University in their first match of the season. Despite the enthusiastic backing of the home crowd, defensive frailties and lack of concentration relegate the team to a 3-0 home defeat. At the end of the match, players walk off the field dejectedly and are met by fans, eager to cheer them up.

A couple of pictures from the match (Earlham is in marooon, Capital in white)

Messer, too, is disappointed, but he knows it’s part of the game, and he’s been around long enough to see the broader picture. He knows that his soccer team is just one part of what makes up Earlham College. “In order to really have a good campus,” Messer says, “there has to be a lively athletic program.”

Earlham players applaud the fans at the end of the game