The Beautiful Team

This story took first place for feature story in the 2011 Minnesota Associated Press Sports Association Awards among dailies under 20,000.

It all started the day the goals came down.

It’s more of a clearing than a soccer field, a grassy expanse nestled behind a modular classroom tucked behind Cannon Valley Lutheran High School on the corner of a four-way stop, just a stocky bridge crossing off Highway 60 in Morristown.

It’s a soccer field in the way that a front yard becomes a football field — run to the trash can, fake right, then cut to the red pickup and I’ll hit you there.

Trees sprout up at random intervals, like monolithic defenders caught in quicksand. Mounds and divots roll and dive, just waiting for an ankle to wrench. But for the neighborhood kids, it was a perfect place to gather on a warm summer’s evening and knock the soccer ball around.

“We just got bored sometimes during the summer and grabbed a bunch of kids from the trailer court,” Frankie Morales said.

Until the soccer nets disappeared.

***

“When you’re a small school you turn a large green space into a soccer field and it works,” CVLHS volunteer development director Mike Young said.

Cannon Valley is a small school in the way a Fiat is a compact car. It sits atop Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Morristown and has an enrollment of 16 students. Up until three years ago, it had a soccer team, but in those days enrollment reached 27. In recent years, there just weren’t enough students to support a team.

Then one day a group of area Latino kids stopped by the parsonage to ask Pastor Eugene Chase where the goals went. Chase explained the goals were taken down for liability reasons and to facilitate mowing the grass. Then he had an idea.

“You guys like soccer, why don’t you come and play for our school this fall?”

And that’s how the menagerie of ethnicities, ages, backgrounds and cultures came together to form the most unlikely of soccer teams.

***

If you just looked at the scoreboard, they didn’t win much. In fact, they didn’t win at all. But oftentimes in sports, the greatest victories don’t correlate with a crooked number spelled out in light bulbs. The CVLHS Titans soccer team was made of up five students from a small Christian high school, three students from Waterville-Elysian-Morristown High School, two from Faribault, one home-schooled kid and three elementary students.

One day during practice they all took off their shoes and flipped over the tongues, comparing the sizes. Little fourth-grader Yianko Borrego had size 4 feet. The largest were size 13.

Over the course of a seven-game season, numerous practices and a few film sessions on YouTube, they became more than teammates. They became friends.

“It’s a very neat thing, breaking the cultural barriers,” Mike said. “It’s a great thing, bringing the two groups together.”

Half the team was Latino, half the team was white. It would be politically correct to say that none of them saw the difference, but that’s not quite true.

“They are much better at soccer than us,” joked Ron Menze, a junior at CVLHS.

It was more that none of them cared about the difference. There were the two WEM players: Roberto Perez and Morales; there were the fourth- and fifth-graders: Jose Perez, Yianko Borrego and Junior Colin; there were the Faribault kids: Joshua Duran and his cousin Marcello; and there were the CVLHS students: Menze, Kourt Remund, Ben Lamont, Mitch Witte and Louis Quiram, plus Mitch’s little brother, Austin.

“It definitely breaks some stereotypes when you get to know people from a different culture and a different segment of society,” said CVLHS Interim Administrator and team coach Andrew Bull.

Sometimes when practice ended they would play a friendly pick-up game, school kids against town kids.

“They would always laugh and joke about how they didn’t need shirts versus skins,” Andrew said.

When practice ended, they didn’t retreat to their separate enclaves. They made that difficult high school leap from acquaintances to buddies.
“I hung out with them a lot,” Frankie said. “When you’re on a team, automatically you get to know that person and build a friendship.”

The town kids attended the CVLHS Homecoming bonfire and a Titans volleyball game. After games, McDonald’s trips would entail everyone ordering fries and dumping them in a towering heap on a tray in the middle of the table. America’s melting pot had become a mountain of salt and beef tallow.

“I’m a lot closer with Frankie and Roberto now,” Mitch said.

“Now I consider them friends,” Ron said. “It was a lot easier than I ever thought it would be.”

What did they bond over? Sports, video games and — they’re high school boys, after all — girls.

“Just put GIRLS in your story in big letters,” Ron joked.

***

Not only did they not know each other, but they barely knew the game. Three of the CVLHS students had never played organized soccer before, and one, Kourt, had just a single year on a U7 team to draw from. At least one of the WEM students had never played before.

“It was just a whole bunch of people you don’t know, starting a team.” Frankie said. “It was fun. It was really frustrating at the same time.”
One week before the school year, the team didn’t even have enough players, there were still just 10 of them.

“We didn’t have enough players, so they started asking, ‘Well I have a little brother who plays, but he’s in seventh grade,’” Andrew said. “Then before long it was, ‘My little brother has a friend, but he’s in fifth grade.’”

So Junior, a fifth-grader who had played in the pick-up games over the summer, joined and so did Josh and Marcello from Faribault. Now there were 13. Andrew went ahead and cold-called a bunch of schools that the Titans play in volleyball and put together a seven-game schedule. They would play their home games at Camp Omega, with one game at the Faribault Soccer Complex. The season opened with a 5-3 loss to Christian Life Farmington.

“The first game we did OK, but we could have done better,” Frankie said. “If we had played our first game at the end of the season, we would have been awesome. We probably would have won.”

Andrew had never coached before — he didn’t intend to coach until no one else stepped forward — and he started by downloading coaching manuals off the Internet. One day, when practice was rained out, he had everyone gather around a computer and watch a YouTube clip of a soccer video game.

“The computer programs the players to do certain things because that’s what real professional players would do,” Andrew said. “We learned about defense and where you ought to be at certain times and how to move the ball around.”

***

By the end of the season, the team’s improvement on the pitch was evident.

“We made a lot of progress,” Frankie said. “We could have beaten a lot of the teams we faced if we didn’t make mistakes, which is surprising.”

Early in the year, the Titans lost 8-2 to Immanuel Mankato. Just two weeks later, they lost 3-0 while scoring a goal on themselves.

“That was kind of a turning point in the season,” Andrew said. “After that game we came back to practice and we realized we had found what really works.”

Most of the CVLHS kids played on defense and the Morristown kids were on offense, led by their mighty fifth-grader, Junior, who stands just over 4-feet tall and scored two goals in the team’s final game against Mountain Lake Christian.

“The kids we were playing against were just enormous,” Andrew said. “Junior was just dribbling around them and in between their legs. They kept getting burned by this little kid. You could see it on his face, that’s probably one of the best moments he’s had all year.”

With three kids who have yet to hit sixth grade, the Titans sometimes looked like something out of the “The Big Green.” Yet they made it work.

“Just because they’re short, doesn’t mean they can’t kick or run,” Mitch said.

“The other team found that out,” Kourt chimed in.

***

The season is over now — it wrapped up on Tuesday — and four of the CVLHS students are gathered on chairs and couches in Andrew’s room on the second floor of the school. They reminisce about games, and learning the game together and the friendships they bridged across cultural gaps.

“It was a learning experience,” Andrew said. “It was really rewarding to get to see everyone get out there and have fun.”

Finally, as the discussion slows and everyone is itching to leave school for the day, they’re asked if they plan on playing again next year.

“Oh yeah.”

“Most definitely.”

“We’ll be juniors and the little guys will grow about two feet.”

“We have a lot of years left with Yianko.”