As college football season begins in earnest this weekend, it will get all the hype that goes with it. However, NCAA college soccer also begins this weekend, at least for me. What follows are some of my thoughts as well as some questions that I am hoping that you, our readers can answer and share your thoughts on as well.
I grew up about 100 miles away from Chicago in the70’s/80’s, and looking back now, it would seem that sports hadn’t gotten to be the complete business that it is today. I remember going to see Chicago Bears players as “The Good News Bears” play basketball games in the off season against our local police basketball team at a high school gymnasium. After the games, the players (who were mostly starters for the Bears) stayed around and talked to us kids and signed autographs. My brother was (and still is) a huge Bears fan and had a pretty good sized scrapbook of newspaper articles from our local newspaper about the Bears. He brought his scrapbook to one of the games and for about 20 minutes my brother was the center of attention as all the Bears players acted like little kids grabbing for his scrapbook to see themselves “memorialized”. He got autographs from all the players both in his scrapbook and his autograph book. He even got Walter Payton to sign his autobiography “Sweetness”. All of this for the 30 bucks my dad paid for three tickets to the game. Further, all of the proceeds went to a local charity.
I share this story, because I don’t think anything like this happens in professional sports anymore, at least not at the highest levels.
However, my experiences with UNLV Men’s Soccer team reflect my memories of the Good News Bears on a regular basis.
I am an assistant principal at an elementary school for the school district here and soccer players have come to schools to read with kids during our district-wide annual “reading week”. I know that they have also gone to middle schools to talk to students about the importance of school and education. During the season, the have school nights where students of the various school can attend games for free.
As my son Zeke has played soccer, we have attended better than half a dozen soccer camps sponsored by the UNLV soccer program (both men and women). The camps are run by the head coaches and conducted by the current players. Zeke has had the opportunity to “play and practice” with them at the camps.
We have been season ticket holders for the last four years as well. After every single home game, win or lose the UNLV players stick around after the game and talk to the kids. They sign the team posters. They sign shirts. They sign soccer balls. They pose for pictures with cameras and camera phones. They stay until the last kid gets dragged of the field by their parents.
Zeke has become “friends” with some of the players to the extent that last year, one of the graduating seniors and starting defenders, Coach Andy who Zeke admired and bonded with through camps and post-game conversations, gave Zeke one of his official playing jerseys. One of the reasons we are Houston Dynamo fans is because Danny Cruz is a UNLV alum.
When Coach Mario Sanchez decided to take a position at another university last winter, he sent an e-mail to the supporters thanking them for his time at UNLV. I wrote a short e-mail back wishing him luck at Louisville, and figured that was that. The next day, I received another, personal e-mail expressing his thanks again and telling me to encourage Zeke to keep playing and to tell Zeke to keep being a Liverpool fan. (Mario is a long time Liverpool fan.)
I am not aware of any other sport at the college or professional level where a fan has such close and unfettered contact with the players and coaches. The UNLV football team has been mediocre at best during my twenty years in Vegas and the only access I am familiar with for fans is in structured pre-game events. Basketball seems to be the same, only more restricted due to the success they have had.
Are you a supporter of your local college/university soccer team?
Is my experience unique?
Do these kind of things happen in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th tier leagues in other countries?
Please share your answers and thoughts in the comments section, and know that this Saturday when most of Las Vegas will be paying attention to the 7:00pm football kick-off between UNLV and Wisconsin at the Silver Bowl, Zeke and I will be fully focused the 7:00pm soccer kick-off between UNLV and Valparaiso at Peter Johann Soccer Field. Go Rebels!
Two things:
The Patriots players (starters!) used to come to our high school every late winter/early spring and play in a “Donkey Basketball” game against our local police/fire department and then against a team of students/teachers. My brother has a great picture of himself with the late Mosi Tatupu.
As for college soccer, being a high school coach completely soured me on it. I’m sure it’s the same in every sport, but seeing players not get recruited because they didn’t have the right ODP connections, or because they didn’t take part in ODP at all (it’s a money making scam and nothing else, by the way). You can also rewrite the same sentence and just swap “club team” for “ODP.”
I guess the flipside is that I was that much prouder of the gals that did go on to play at the college level- Brown, Bucknell, Tulane, Framingham State, Bates, Mulhenberg, Fairfiled, College of the South (Sewanee), and probably a bunch of others that I’m forgetting at the moment
When I was a mere college puke, I was part of our team’s renegade cheering section, the “Pots N Spoons,” who banged on metal objects and chanted the entire game. At least during the early part of the year before their games coincided with my swim meets. My personal favorite moment was doing “Who Ate All the Pies” at BC’s keeper, who was British (which is where I learned the cheer). The keeper turned to us and rubbed his belly, which earned him a big cheer and eternal gratitude.
Sadly, during my senior year, the Big East enacted some rule banning outside noisemakers or something. I, who also worked for one of the school papers, broke the story about myself being banned from fieldside.
Last year I decided to start a club: the Rakes of Mallow (see link in nickname) This club would be the soccer supporters club of Notre Dame. My thoughts were that this club will be about 30 members max, so to get approval, I went to the Athletic Department. A few months later I got an e-mail from the head coach of the women’s team asking me to meet with him and the head coach of the men’s team. They basically loved the idea and gave their full support. They took it to the players, and they too loved it. Last night as I set up my booth for Activities Night, expecting 50-75 to sign up if I was lucky. Suddenly 3 players turned up and began helping get people to sign up. Today I am still typing up the spreadsheet for the email list and I am on name #200 of a 10 page list of 300 names. As the players explained to me, they love it when students turn up. They give them something extra to go after.
Now ND wants the members of the group to have a dinner with the teams, march to the match, and official scarves. No other sport can I think of such events happening.
College soccer is something special