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Chapter One

The boys were on time for a change. There was no such thing as "Latino time" during the state high school playoffs, that customary half-hour tardiness in which they showed up one by one, drifting onto the field still in their street clothes. They arrived tonight dressed to play in their white home jerseys, royal-blue shorts, and white socks pulled up over their knees to keep their legs warm from the cold November night. They went right away to the bag of soccer balls on the sideline, took one, and ran out onto the field like colts bolting over an open plain, kicking and jumping in the crisp autumn air. They immediately started taking shots on goal, warming up our goalkeeper, "Fish," for the game.

I went out to meet them—handing out pinnies, warm-up vests in bright yellow—to divide them into two teams so they could go through our normal warm-up drill before a game. "¡Eh! ¡El juego de posesión! ¡Ahorita!" I yelled at them, blowing my whistle. "Hey! The possession game! Now!" The boys quickly split off into two teams and started playing keep-away with the ball, possessing it with the pass, two-touch only, moving it from one side of the field to the other on the ground, passing it around from one player to another as fast as they could.

Across the field, the Hendersonville Bearcats were performing their own warm-up drills. They had traveled more than five hours on their school bus from the Appalachian Mountains to Siler City, North Carolina, a small poultry-processing town in the middle of the state. They were vastly different from my team. Their soldier-like warm-ups included jogging together in a straight line across the field, kicking their legs up high, and touching their toes with the tips of their fingers to stretch their leg muscles. My stomach tightened when I saw their size and height. They were the opposite of the Jets. These were tall, big, beefy white mountain boys who played a physical game known for its long-ball style; they kicked the ball up the field and sprinted after it, outmuscling the opposition and shooting on goal.

"Mira, Cuadros, son grandes," said Perico, one of our forwards who barely stood more than five feet tall and whose name means little bird. "Look, Cuadros, they're huge."

I looked at him as I put my hand on his shoulder and laughed.

"It doesn't matter, they're always bigger than you, right?" Perico's face lit up and he smiled, nodding. I wasn't even much taller than he was. We were Latinos and we had learned to play a different style of game against bigger teams—excellent ball control, tricky moves, and possessing the ball on the ground. We focused on being quicker, making short passes, moving the ball around, and attacking at high speed. It had won us the conference championship for the first time and we were about to put our style to the test against a team that had crushed us during our first season.

Two years ago, we had traveled the five hours to Hendersonville in the second round of the playoffs only to be bruised and beaten by the Bearcats. We were an excellent team, loaded with talent in every position, but the Bearcats played aggressively, physically, knocking our guys down and battering them. We were too one-dimensional that first year. The soccer program at Jordan-Matthews was new and I had not had the time to train them out of their bad habits, refine their game, and help them learn how to play more as a team. We could not possess the ball then. After we lost to Hendersonville 1–0, it had taken me two years to break bad habits, bad thinking, and put in place a new system, a new style, one that did not rely on one player who could be shut down, but on an entire team of players who could step up and win games.

I wanted them to win this game very much: not only to move the team to the quarterfinals of the playoffs and put us one step closer to the finals, but also as a way of putting that horrible night behind us. As a coach, you have to keep a lot of your feelings inside and only carefully, strategically, let them out. But deep inside, against a team that beat us badly, and where the atmosphere was so poisonous against our boys, I felt it personally. Soccer is not like other sports. It is passionate. It is volatile. It is emotional.

Unlike so many sports in the United States, the clock doesn't stop in soccer. There are no time-outs, no commercial breaks, and no strategic stoppages where the coach can affect the game. Soccer is a players' game. The players play on despite fouls, penalty kicks, missed shots, vicious slide tackles, elbows to the face, unseen hand balls, fights, arguments with refs, and screaming fans and coaches. The players have to figure out for themselves how to come through all those emotions to win.

The best teams can do it with grace and skill and they are a sight to behold. The worst teams do it through thuggery. Latinos are passionate, and that's why we love soccer so much. The game is always played in our throats whether you are a player, coach, or fan. Americans cannot understand how two countries could go to war after a soccer match, as happened in 1969 between Honduras and El Salvador. Latinos ask: How can you not?

The game was about to begin, and I gathered the team together for one last talk. I wanted them to feel the weight of the moment, to know that we were capable of rising to the occasion.

"Well, boys, here we are again." I needed to inspire them, fire them up, get them ready to go out to the field pumped up and ready to start . . .

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Excerpted from A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America by Paul Cuadros
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