Mosquito and Goliath
What do a bunch of 8-year-olds know that we may not? The future belongs to soccer

By Jim Haner
Sunday, April 16, 2006

As the wolf pack closes in, the Mosquito lies in wait.

Shifting ever so slightly on the balls of her feet, she bides her time, measuring the ground between them -- her ground. Closer, closer. The wolves are cocky. She has seen their kind many times before, all boiling with bravado, jacked up on Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs and Gatorade until their eyeballs are jiggling in their sockets.

"Look, a girl!" they jeered before the game. "They got a girl! We're gonna kill 'em! Yeah!"

As her coach, it was music to me, for nothing motivated her more than the loudmouth derision of her opponents. And nothing was more damaging to the other team's morale than the moment when she reared up and kicked their sorry butts.

Four of them are now charging downfield, forming around a lead striker on the fly. He's a belligerent Sluggo, bossing and pointing and directing traffic as he pounds the ball forward, over the smashed brown grass of Magruder Field and the bald patches of dirt where 10 million kickoffs and Saturday morning scrums have killed every living thing within a nine-foot circle. Not even ants can survive out here.

Sluggo is big and fast as a wagon full of rocks rolling downhill. He's used to getting his way, intimidating everyone around him -- and he's eyeing the Mosquito with a murderous gleam. Before him stands a pixie of a girl. Her teammates call her the Mosquito because she is the smallest member of the squad -- and because she harasses opponents to their last nerve. On this unforgettable day, she is 8 years old. Thirty-six pounds soaking wet, with a ponytail dyed blue some days to match her uniform. Her name is Shelby Hammond. And she lives to play soccer. She is the star defender and only girl left on the 8-and-under College Park Hornets in the soccer-crazed suburbs of Washington.

The Hornets have been together for two years by this point -- roughly 75 practices and 35 Pee Wee league games, enough to learn the basics of the sport, enough for a few of them to demonstrate something that might be called "consistency." But none is yet as consistent as Shelby. She is crouching low now, rocking from side to side. Her steel-blue eyes are unreadable -- a strange, unnerving void. Sluggo hesitates in mid-rush, momentarily perplexed. He is closing fast, driving the ball in a bum's rush for the goal, but the Mosquito shows none of the customary signs of panic or submission. In fact, she appears to be grinning at him.

Closer . . . closer . . . closer . . . The relievers erupt on the sideline -- "Shelby! Shelby! Shelby!" -- as the rest of the Hornets on the field begin to wheel into position. It is the only thing I have ever managed to teach them in two years of coaching, the importance of orbiting in one particular spot on the field instead of chasing after the ball in a mob and kicking one another black-and-blue.

Thomas Waring, the team's hard-hitting midfielder and the kid who usually runs to the rescue on defense, is shot. Twice the size of the Mosquito, he's caked with dirt, red-faced and soaked from battling for the ball against his oversize rivals -- 37 minutes of lunch-bucket soccer that has earned him the nickname the Hammer. The sandy-haired bodyguard stands on buckled legs, hands on hips, panting, 30 yards away from the action.

Ben Haner and Bryan Basdeo -- two-thirds of the Hornets' triple-threat offense, are rolling back across midfield, trailed by Kevin Guerrero, the team's leading scorer. Kevin -- the Salvadoran Terror -- is the son, grandson and great-grandson of players. In Kevin's world, kids take their first steps on soccer fields, and they get their first pair of shin guards when they are 3. The game is the center of community life for Washington's Latino immigrants. There are matches every weekend and doubleheaders during holidays, and the families bring food, so there's no reason to go home before nightfall.

Ben, Bryan and Kevin know it's now or never. The score is 3-2. Underdog College Park is down by one goal to the team from Beltsville, favorites to win the division and advance, as always, to the county league championship. One more score, and the Hornets become just another speed bump in powerhouse B-ville's blitz to glory.

"Shelby! Shelby! Shelby!" the relievers chant.

"Three minutes, Shelby!" I bellow across the ocher plain, my voice swallowed up by the gusting wind and the war whoops on the sideline. "Three minutes -- and it's game over!"

"Don't worry none, Shelby's gonna take him," the Mosquito's father says in his lazy West Virginia drawl. "Shelby's gonna chew him up, y'all will see." Terry Hammond is a walking refrigerator, a cabinet installer by trade and a former high school jock who signed on as my assistant coach on a lark and quickly became absorbed in every aspect of this game that neither of us had ever played.

The big man watches, expressionless, as Beltsville's horde closes in on his only child, the little girl who changed him from a pool shark and rabid football fan into a doting butler, chauffeur and equipment manager for a junior soccer prodigy.

The attackers are 20 feet out, tearing toward the right side of the goal, when they begin their familiar death spiral. Their coach, a towering guy in his mid-fifties with a receded hairline and a sprig of mustache under his nose, has been teaching this maneuver to kids for more than a decade. His name is Dave Pinchotti. He is one of the most well-regarded coaches in Prince George's County, a gracious sort who never fails to congratulate opposing coaches after crushing their hopes.

With Pinchotti's alpha striker bearing down on the net, the rest of the wolf pack veers to the left and fans out in front of the goal. When Sluggo shoots, they will swarm the Mosquito, confusing her goalie, coming at the ball from all sides. That's their plan. But then, Shelby makes her move. Facing her opponent like a basketball guard, she shuffles three steps to her right, taking away the inches that Sluggo needs to shoot to the deep right corner of her net -- the shot he wants. In closing his angle, she forces him toward the center, where her goalkeeper can better make a play if Shelby falls down or falters. What's more, her move forces the rest of the pack to move left to open up space for their leader until they drift . . . one by one . . . out of the play.

To make sure they stay that way, the Hornets' No. 2 defender, an insubordinate little genius named Linus Hamilton, dashes in between them and the outside goalpost for the checkmate. No kid on the team has a better sense of the geometry of the game than Linus, and no kid is quite so adept at critiquing the performance of the coaches.

"You might want to try this," he'll say, or, "Their forward looks small, but it's a mistake to underestimate him."

"Thank you, Professor," we'll tell him, "Now please sit down."

"Linus's problem," I tell Terry Hammond one day at practice, "is that he's smarter than us."

In fact, they are all smarter than we are, more adaptable, more flexible thinkers for not having a lifetime of preconceived notions about sports and how they should be played. In my journey from bumbling Parents' Night draftee to ranting soccer freak and, finally, to fairly able coach, I would learn most of what I needed to know from children.

It's one-on-one now, the Mosquito vs. Sluggo, and Sluggo is confused. His overwhelming advantage has dissolved, and this damnable girl has shown no sign of folding. There is no fear in her eyes, which are blazing, locked onto the ball and the movement of his hooves.

"There is no animal more invincible than a woman," wrote the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes, "nor fire either, nor any wildcat so ruthless." Sluggo is about to learn the truth of this.

In the aluminum bleachers on the other side of the field, the Hornets' parents rise to their feet, mouths open. It is "the moment of tension," as Dutch soccer photographer Hans van der Meer once described it -- that thin slice of a 40-, 60-, or 90-minute game when 10,000 variables converge to produce a flash point in which anything can happen. Whether professional or amateur, soccer is made of such sudden happenings. Unlike in American football, the clock never stops. There are no huddles or timeouts. Unlike baseball, there is no ritual adjusting of codpieces, no practice swings or conferences on the mound, no standing around in the outfield waiting for the next hit while the pitcher reads 27 hand signs from a guy squatting behind home plate.

Soccer is distinct among all sports as a study in constant motion. Every second is precious. Every pass, shot, block or steal has the potential to alter the outcome for good. Promising paths taken up or down the field expire in dead ends or defensive traps. Over and over again. The power of a single star to drastically affect the ebb and flow of the action -- the trump card in basketball, hockey or football; the reason why Jordan, Gretzky and Payton are modern folk heroes -- is most often nullified by the capriciousness of the ball, the immense field, the sheer distances that must be traveled, and the limitations of human endurance and foresight. Above all else, soccer is an ongoing exercise in discombobulation and perseverance. Teamwork. Trust. For more than 200 years these have been the only reliable routes to success in this game. And the Hornets trust Shelby.

Ben, Bryan and Kevin are in position at midfield -- ready to take the pass they are sure will come. None of them rushes to help her.

"Shelby, Shelby, Shelby!"

The range is down to less than three feet when the Mosquito finally strikes. Back to the net, shoulders squared, she halts her 10-yard retreat and launches a sudden feint, a small lashing kick, then backpedals again to see what happens. Sluggo obliges her by overreacting. Already rattled by her un-natural composure, he pips the ball even farther to his left, his "weak side," attempting to evade a challenge that hasn't yet materialized. Now he's lost control of the ball, and he's off-kilter. He is also inside the painted white box in front of our net, not 10 feet from our goal. If Shelby fouls him now, the referee will give Sluggo a penalty kick, a free point-blank shot at the net.

Watching the moment unfold, I realize I am lightheaded, sucking wind as if I were the one doing the running. On my next breath, Shelby counterattacks in earnest. She brushes the ball with the tip of her toe, drops her shoulder and plants it in Sluggo's chest, then swipes him with her arm as she ricochets toward the meandering sphere. It's a circus move, straight out of pro wrestling or hockey, and the physics of it send the brute twirling. The sneer drops from the boy's face as the Mosquito squirts away with the ball and 110 pounds of goalie named Edward Curry barrel into him.

Edward is exceedingly large for an 8-year-old. His teammates call him the Rhino.

The karmic splendor of the comeuppance is lost on the Beltsville loyalists in the bleachers.

"Foul! Foul! Hey, ref, where's the foul?"

They're up now, stamping their feet, and several are rushing to the touchline at the edge of the field. They're red-faced, throwing their ball caps, casting imploring looks across the turf at Coach Dave. But Pinchotti is as unperturbed as ever, his gaze fixed downfield on the unfolding action. Oblivious to the outrage of his followers, he checks his watch: less than two minutes to go . . . and counting.

IT IS AT TIMES LIKE THIS that the cultural divisions in youth soccer are most keenly seen. For the howlers among the parents are, by a wide margin, American-born white suburbanites steeped in the familiar rules that govern basketball and football -- where almost every form of touching can be nitpicked in the name of fairness into various forms of foul. Noticeable on such occasions is the relative calm of the Latino, African, Asian and Indian parents. The Guatemalans and Hondurans. The Nigerians and Moroccans. The Vietnamese and Chinese and Filipinos. Hindu, Sikh and Muslim.

These newcomers have been playing soccer all their lives, and they are accustomed to the seemingly whimsical officiating of their native game. Absent a clear showing of malice, most physical contact on the field is considered incidental to the kinetic forces that make soccer the "beautiful game": speed, agility, dexterity, flexibility, aggressiveness, power on the ball. To stop the action at every bump or jostle would carve out the very heart of the thing. Add the fact that the referees are sprinting much of the time and that it is unreasonable to expect them to get a clear enough look at a crime in progress to make an arrest in the vast majority of cases. Nor would most fans want them to. For in this game, as in life, bumps and scrapes and setbacks are expected as cosmic forces unfurl, and the immigrant soccer fans seem to have faith that the leveling hand of God will set things mostly right in the end.

Not so their native-born neighbors. Almost nothing about soccer conforms to American conceptions about sports -- or life in general. For one thing, you can't use your hands, which makes everything else more difficult. For another, there's only so much you can do with your feet to make a speeding ball behave rationally. Efficiency and expediency, which might as well be lyrics in the National Anthem, are stymied at every turn. By necessity, legality becomes a much more fluid concept, based on snap interpretations of 17 bright line "laws" -- which date to the 19th century -- by referees who are beyond the checks and balances of instant replay or umpire conferences. For Americans, with their vestigial Puritan morality, their ornate codes of conduct and their Constitutional entitlement to be secure in their personal space, watching their kids play this immoral game can provoke a spontaneous infarction.

On the sidelines, they can be heard bleating at the absurdity of it all, especially the fathers. Men who have thrown, caught, hit, held and shot every manner of ball will clench their fists and pound their thighs at the sight of their children spastically struggling to achieve with their feet and heads what they could do in half the time with their hands. "Foul! God damn it, ref! Foul!"

Here is the sound of the Old Order dying, the anguished rattle of well-settled expectations shattering. It is the sound of the comfortable majority losing its grip on familiar and predictable entitlements. For them, this foreign game is like a plague, skimming off the cream of the nation's high school athletes and consuming vast tracts of land for "soccerplexes." They see it vying for the affection of their children, 14 million of whom now play soccer in organized leagues -- 6 million of them teenagers; the game is now a varsity sport in 8,000 U.S. high schools, up from just 800 about 30 years ago. Yes, soccer is here to stay, and the weekend soccer dad knows it, and it is driving him out of his mind because his kids love it and he doesn't know the first thing about it. Watching these parents squirm, I empathize. I once was among them, as mystified by the seeming lawlessness and hypnotic effects of soccer as I ever was by the Byzantine mysteries of curling and cricket. Football was my sport, the only thing I ever really cared about. But I was won over by this game that requires far more skill, where the violence is more discreet and less likely to cripple, where rules are less a constant factor and arbitration has no place at all.

"FOUL! HEY, REF, FOUL!"

It is too late. The moment has passed. Sluggo is eating dirt somewhere beneath the toppled Rhino, and the Mosquito is on the move, trailed by the tattered remnants of Beltsville's barbarian legion. Whatever slim hope their supporters had of inducing the referee to grant the team a penalty kick is gone in less than two seconds. In two "touches" -- two quick kicks of the ball -- Shelby is beyond their immediate reach, bobbing and weaving toward the sideline. She gives a glance and finds her strikers exactly where she expects them to be, strung out in a line at midfield, spaced a nearly perfect 12 feet apart, poised like relay sprinters awaiting a baton.

She does not have much time for decision. The drum of footsteps behind her is getting louder as the shellshocked opposition organizes itself in pursuit. In a matter of seconds, one of her opponents will pull even to shoulder her off the ball while the other two tear ahead to block her passing lanes. These kids are bigger, faster, stronger, and she is tiring. The element of surprise is now lost. The time is now. The Mosquito wallops the ball upfield -- whump! -- then slows and finally stops. Bending at the waist, hands on knees, she gulps in air.

What happens next is almost hard to believe, and Coach Pinchotti is the only one who sees it coming. His team is now hopelessly out of position. His midfielder, Sluggo, is struggling to untangle himself from the Rhino's embrace. His three strikers are exhausted from the long charge downfield and the unexpected chase back the way they came. The ball is gone, moving away from them faster than they can possibly run. And it is heading straight for the Hornets' most proficient dribbler -- the kid with the blond bowl haircut and the flying feet. The coach's kid. The lefty.

"Watch out for him," Pinchotti yells to his two defenders as they charge past. "That kid is dangerous."

If they hear him at all, they don't heed the warning. My boy is a blur now. He has always had a comically short stride on the run, and he moves so fast that it gives him an almost reckless appearance that worries opponents. He sweeps in behind Shelby's pass and pushes the ball out in front of him, away from the center of the field, in a wide arc that takes it very close to the right touchline. It's a practiced maneuver, designed to draw the defenders to him while cutting off their ability to move on the ball -- because most youth players have no idea that it is perfectly legal in soccer to step out-of-bounds to make a play, as long as the ball stays on the field. Hemmed in against the line, they rush straight at him, shoulder to shoulder. They're falling for one of his best tricks.

IT HELPS THAT BEN HAS BEEN PLAYING this game since he was old enough to walk. Before he could even speak in complete sentences, my son was being schooled in the basic mechanics of soccer by a West African nanny who would roll balls at him on the lawn and urge him in French to blast them to la lune -- the moon, outer space, his destiny. Her name was Maggie Dahl. She was a political refugee from Togo who fled under a death warrant for participating in a rural voter registration drive. An accountant by training, her English was not nearly serviceable enough to pursue her trade in the United States, so, like so many other immigrant women in the Washington area -- where industrial jobs are all but nonexistent -- she sought work in child care. When she moved in with us, in 1996, a great blessing was visited upon the future Hornet with the bowl haircut.

In her heavily accented English, Maggie pronounced her national game "sock-air," and on warm summer nights, as Ben whacked a ball around in the yard, she patiently explained to me that it is not merely a game, but rather "the game" -- so deeply ingrained in the fabric of everyday life in her country that it is, in many ways, the primary instrument of socialization for young children. How the game is played in one corner of the globe or another is seen as a manifestation of national character and identity everywhere else. And in learning how to play, children internalize the traits that are valued in their society. Maggie insisted that these things were generally understood everywhere but here. Soccer was a way of life, she assured me, the one perfect metaphor for everything.

"In Brazil, oh!" she said. "It is très beautiful! They play such soccer there, it is like dancing."

As serious students of the game will tell you, it's all that and then some. The Brazilians play as they live, with a wide-open, unstructured style that gives free rein to individual flourish and feats of athletic heroism. They call it samba, after their national dance. It's high risk, fraught with injuries, wild swings in momentum and soaring scores. The Dutch, in stark contrast, play a highly organized variety of soccer that features precision dribbling and close-quarters passing. The aim is not necessarily to score early, but rather to maintain possession of the ball until an opponent fades from exhaustion late in the game. It is soccer by geometric attrition, and it suits a lowland country where civil engineering is a religion and meticulous attention to detail is all that holds back the raging sea.

Among other notable styles of play, the Italians are stubbornly defensive on the field and famously voluble in the clutch. It is soccer as opera. British teams, on the other hand, are regimented and play a breakneck offensive game that is more than a little violent. The Irish and Nigerians are just plain mean, masters of the "hard tackle" and the discreet elbow to the nose. And so on. And so forth. And all of these things are fairly well understood all over the world -- except in the United States.

Thanks to his French-speaking, Togolese nanny, my Irish-Polish-German boy plays like a Brazilian, a seemingly improbable lineage that is increasingly common for young American soccer players, many of whom now have Latino coaches or team trainers. Or multilingual coaches of uncertain ethnic origin. During the summers, they attend high-priced soccer camps that have become totems of middle-class arrival for an increasingly diverse white-collar workforce. They are the children of tech immigrants, African American strivers and newly minted professionals with no-collar roots -- parents like me who made good on a working-class upbringing and found ourselves pulled in by the almost irresistible gravity that soccer exerts in suburbia. Because of this game, our kids know things about the world that we never imagined at such an early age; and from the tutoring of foreign-born teachers, some of them have that rarest of skills: ambidextrous feet.

THE BELTSVILLE DEFENDERS RUSH IN, and Ben suddenly comes to a dead stop in front of them -- pooching the ball back toward the center of the field with the outside of his left foot. Both defenders fly past him, through the vacant space where the ball was supposed to be, in a classic case of "overplaying" and underestimating their opponent. Just as their error is dawning on them, Ben jukes left, pokes the ball with his right toe, and jets back toward his buddies at midfield with the prize.

Six of the seven Beltsville kids on the field are now out of position, trailing far behind. The Hornets are all holding their spots. Two minutes to go, with the score 3-2 in his favor, Pinchotti stands with his arms folded across his chest, beaming. Could it be that the runts from College Park might tie the score against his awesome juggernaut?

Ben nudges the ball once more, pushing it back on course, straightening it into a beeline toward the goal, then looks ahead to find his man. Sure as cornflakes in the morning, Kevin Guerrero is way out in front of him, smack in the middle of the wide open field, looking over his shoulder on the fly, waving his right arm for the pass, yelling to his teammate, "La pelota! La pelota!" The ball. The ball. Give me the ball.

Streaming down the opposite touchline, Bryan Basdeo paces himself to be the second man at the net, the striker who cleans up any errant shots or fumbled saves by the goalkeeper. He is so good at these mop-up shots that he is the Hornets' second leading scorer, the one they call Bigfoot. More often than not, however, "The Ben and Kevin Show" leaves nothing to clean up. On his third touch, Ben's right foot explodes on the ball with enough torque to spin him bodily into the grass. The ball sails up straight and true. At its apex, it seems to hang in midair for a small eternity before landing six inches in front of the charging striker. All the math is now in favor of the Salvadoran Terror. Momentum. Distance. Timing. Velocity. Kevin flicks out his right foot at a full run, cushions the ball's landing with his instep, pushes it out in front of him . . . and fires.

It's a head-high shot from close range, straight at Beltsville's goalie. Heeding a primal survival instinct, the kid squats to save his nose, shuts his eyes, throws up his gloved hands, and hopes for the best. The ball has other plans. It rockets over his outstretched fingertips and splashes into center net, untouched.

"Goal! Goal! Goal!"

The Hornets go berserk on the sideline -- Michael, Braulio, Robbie, all the relievers and coaches, leaping and tripping over one another. Shelby's father, Terry, grabs me in a bearhug and squeezes the air from my lungs, then drops me back into my shoes, wheezing. Ben, Shelby and Thomas slap five at midfield. Kevin sheers away from the net and cuts a U-turn, flying back up the sideline, grinning his famous foot-wide grin and pumping his skinny arms. His parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins leap up from the island of blankets they have spread in the grass. His grandfather and family patriarch, Rafael Guerrero, raises his arms in the air, yelling, "Goal! Goal! Goal!"

"Okay, guys, we got a little less than a minute to go, and it's their ball," I shout to the kids on the field. "They're going to come at us with everything they've got. So be ready."

If I have learned anything about coaching the game after dozens of crushing defeats and near victories turned to ties by last-minute goals in an opponent's favor it is this: The ecstatic moments after you score are when the other team is most dangerous. Your guard is down, and their fangs are bared. But Beltsville doesn't have much fang left. Sluggo and his associates mount a halfhearted attack that peters out in a defensive trap. The clock expires. The referee blows his whistle. Final score: 3-3.

In the traditional end-of-game ceremony, the two teams line up in columns, then run past each other, touching hands. Then, Pinchotti -- Coach Dave, the boss of mighty Beltsville -- walks over to congratulate the rivals. "I've been watching soccer for a long time," he tells us, "and that was one of the most beautiful plays I've ever seen. You guys have done a hell of a job with these kids. If they're only 8 now, imagine what they'll look like in another year." In the lore of the Hornets, this would be remembered as a defining moment -- the Play and the Day. It would be discussed for months, even years, to come. They had gutted it out and stuck together to match the best team in the league. At 8 years old, they had built themselves a small monument. Whether they could preserve it was another question.

Jim Haner is a writer living in Rockville. This is an excerpt from his first book, SOCCERHEAD: An Accidental Journey Into the Heart of the American Game, published this month by North Point Press, an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC. Copyright 2006 by Jim Haner. All rights reserved.