The day I broke down on the floor of the dressing room after the state championship game

In Atlanta in the late 1960s, soccer was not exactly popular.  Neither were the people who played it.

I take that back.  The soccer players at North Springs, my old high school, did all right socially, but not solely because we played a particular sport as happened with the football and basketball players.  We labored in anonymity as far as our sport was concerned, playing in empty stadiums through the winter when we wouldn’t compete for space and players with the football team.  We surely would not have competed for fans in any case.

But soccer was trying to make its entrance into America in general and to Atlanta in particular, and I loved it.  The North American Soccer League started a professional league in 1967, and the Atlanta Chiefs had imported marquee players from all over the world.  Pelé had come to conduct a national tour with his Brazilian team Santos, and a lot of momentum seemed to be forming behind the growth of soccer at the time.

My high school started a soccer team during 1965-66, my freshman year.  We were first public high school in Georgia to do so.  Before that, soccer had been the province of the private schools, the Westminsters and Lovetts of the blessed Atlanta upper classes.  They beat us badly in our early days.  Within a year or two, however, we were started beating them on a regular basis.  More public schools were starting teams, so the Georgia High School Association began holding state championships in soccer.

Our team was fortunate to have some fine coaching.  One of the school’s teachers was the head coach, but a man from the community volunteered to help out.  He had played semi-professionally as a goalkeeper in New Jersey’s ethnic leagues.  He owned a carpet company in the area, so he had the time to devote to us.  He had a magnetic personality and a vast knowledge of the game and of human nature in general.  His most valuable attribute, one I have tried to emulate myself, is that he knew what not to worry about.  This saved us valuable time and kept us focused on what was really going to help us.

His presence caused conflict, though.  The actual head coach of the team resented that this volunteer had so much control over the team.  We listened to the head coach; we did what he said; but he could tell that we listened to the other man in a different, almost reverent way.  The other teams in the region had a problem with our “assistant coach,” too.  They actually were able to pass a rule against “unaffiliated” coaches sitting on the bench during games.  They couldn’t keep him from sitting in the stands right behind the bench, though, and that’s where he was for every game.

With all of this as context, our team was able to win the Georgia State Championship my junior and senior year.  The second one was probably the most memorable for many reasons.  For one thing, we didn’t actually win it outright; we were awarded a co-championship after the game went into the eight overtime periods, and the hosting school refused to turn on the lights when it got too dark to play.  To make the situation worse, the opponent had scored on a gift from the referee, an unearned penalty kick late in regulation.

The game was especially traumatic and emotional for me.  I scored our team’s goal on a head ball from about 15 yards out, so I felt great about that.  I was not able to do any more, however, in part because of the conflict between our coaches.  The head coach wanted to use a more defensive alignment, while the volunteer coach wanted to stick with the alignment we had used all along, a 2-3-5.  No team would use that alignment today, but it had worked well for us in those early days.  The head coach’s solution was to decree that the “wings” (forwards who tend to play toward the sidelines) had to play defense against the opposing team’s wings in addition to their primary attacking role.  Since I was a “winger,” this required me to play “endline to endline,” which I was pretty well able to do for the length of a regulation game, but as the overtimes kept coming, and we continued to push to win the game, I got as exhausted as I think I ever have been in my life.

The game ended.  It must have ended.  I don’t recall it.  The only clear memory I have of the period after the game is walking into the unheated locker room, throwing my shirt down on the concrete floor, and collapsing onto it, gasping and sobbing.  When I was able to get to my feet, I remember going to our volunteer coach and apologizing for the “loss.”  I tried to reassure him that I had tried my hardest, but it was clear that he already knew that.  He gave me a pat on the shoulder and told me to shake it off.

Well, I can’t say I have shaken it off, even 40 years later.  The game was full of emotion, frustration, exhaustion, conflict, and injustice for me.  I have remembered it painfully for all these years as a time when the adults ruined it for the kids.

The referee called a game-changing hand ball, solely on the basis of sound.  The ball hit our midfielder’s thigh, but the ref could not have seen that; he was trailing the play by 20-30 yards.  It must have sounded like it hit his hand, so he called the penalty kick.  I was behind our midfielder, in front of my own goal, playing defense, playing “endline to endline,” when I saw the ball hit our midfielder’s thigh.

The other adult, our titular head coach, vented his frustration at the situation he found himself in, and the result was visited on me.  I don’t know if he did this purposely to disadvantage me personally, but I know he never nominated me for any post-season awards, never showed any regard for me at all, really.  I also know that he spent the whole game screaming at me to get back and “cover my man.”  The fatigue built up and kept me from being effective on attack, and I know that I could have won us the game, one way or another, except for this.  He sacrificed me and the rest of the team for his selfish goal of resisting the volunteer coach’s influence.

During my adult life, I was involved in teaching and coaching and refereeing for 25 years, and I always tried to make sure I never did anything like these two people–my coach and that ref–did that day.  In many ways, I continue to think kids often are better off without any adult intervention at all.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *