They Get Kicks Getting Out The Word : Soccer: Athletes are planning a return to Uganda, where they’ll play matches and deliver the message of Christianity.

Standing on a bridge at the source of the Nile on Lake Victoria, Dave Irby and his soccer team got a chilling introduction to Uganda.

It was here, they were told, that Idi Amin’s soldiers lined up mostly Christians, shot them and pushed them into the river.

“They said they killed so many that the crocodiles couldn’t eat them all,” Irby said.

A scary image for anyone, but for a group of Christian missionaries you might think it would be downright disconcerting.

Fortunately, for Irby and his team, it was 1989 not 1979 and Amin, a brutal dictator who is accused of murdering and torturing 250,000 people, was in exile.

Because the country’s five-year civil war had ended about three years before, there was little to fear. They had been warmly welcomed by the Ugandan government and the soldier holding the machine gun was there only to protect them.

And for every fearful image, there were two of joy. Using soccer matches against Ugandan professional teams as the lure, the team drew large, enthusiastic crowds to hear its Christian message. It gave soccer clinics in villages, playing impromptu games against barefoot children.

A week from Sunday, Irby’s Vanguard Football Club will return to Uganda. It will play four matches in four days at the 5,000-foot elevation and then fly to Nairobi, Kenya, for two more matches. Each member of the team is packing an extra bag of soccer equipment, school and medical supplies.

“The smiles of the people and those happy faces are just branded in my memory,” forward Jon Bergen said.

The Fullerton-based club, primarily made up of players from local Christian colleges including Concordia University, Southern California College and Pacific Christian, takes a missionary trip overseas each summer. The Vanguards have toured Czechoslovakia, Holland, Austria, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Asia and Central America, among other locales, but it is the 1989 trip to Africa that seems most special.

Perhaps it’s because of the crowds of up to 25,000 they played for last time or that the matches were broadcast live on television and radio.

“It’s a big event,” Bergen said. “If I were to compare it with something it would be like a Billy Graham crusade in the United States, only it’s in Africa and uses soccer as an appetizer.”

Heady stuff for soccer players from the United States, a country where soccer is televised less often then swamp-buggy racing.

But if it were merely an ego-boosting experience, few players would make the effort to raise the $3,000 each to go with the team to Africa.

Irby, a Yorba Linda soccer buff who has been to the last three World Cups and already has tickets for the ’94 Cup in the United States, formed the team--originally called the Orange Seahorses--in 1985 and serves as the coach and general manager.

Irby, who also coached Covina Gladstone and Glendora high schools and Christ College Irvine, gave up his career as a collegiate coach to make sports ministry his full-time vocation. He supports his wife, Susie, and three children on a salary of about $26,000.

Irby, 40, holds the highest U.S. Soccer Federation coaching license and has turned the Vanguards into one of the best teams in the Pacific Soccer League, Southern California’s top semi-professional league.

More importantly to Irby, the Vanguards have the league’s most sportsmanlike players. The team has won the sportsmanship trophy in four of its six seasons and in 1988-89 went the entire season without receiving yellow- or red-card warnings.

Impeccable credentials for an American club team, perhaps. But they mean next to little in the rest of the world, and Ugandan fans were not impressed at first last time. Newspapers predicted Irby’s team would be humiliated. Scores of 10-0 weren’t out of the question.

“We were such a novelty,” Irby said. “Americans playing soccer was such a strange thing to them. They honestly didn’t believe we could kick a ball and walk at the same time.”

But the Vanguards proved more than worthy. They lost their first game, 1-0, to the Nile F.C. and then beat the Express, the second best team in the country, 1-0. They tied another top team K.C.C., 1-1, in front of 25,000 in the national stadium and played that team to a 3-3 tie in a rematch.

Some of the most memorable moments came off the field. The team visited a hospital which was one of the few buildings in the town of Masaka spared by bombs.

Bergen, who played at Christ College Irvine for a season before finishing his collegiate career at Western Connecticut State, said he was in a room in which an AIDS patient had just died. Nearby, there was a woman who had recently given birth.

“When you come to a place like Uganda where there is such turmoil, you feel compassion for the people and you want to help them,” Irby said. “We can’t cure AIDS. We can’t give them a lot of money. But we can at least give them spiritual help.”

In a low-pressure religious presentation, usually after a soccer match, the Vanguard players share their message and hand out Biblical tracts to those who remain.

But the most effective way of spreading the gospel might be the way the Vanguards turn the other cheek on the playing field.

In a game at Uganda’s national stadium, Bergen was taken down from behind by a tackle that Irby said was a flagrant and successful attempt to injure. Although the injury was painful and bad enough to keep him off the field for six weeks, Bergen didn’t retaliate.

“It’s hard for the first 10 seconds,” Bergen said. “You are on the ground and it hurts. When you get up, you have to make a decision but what echoed in my head was (tour director and former Westmont Coach) Russ Carr saying if there was one slap to the head in retaliation, four years of hard work goes down the tubes.”

“So I got up and just shook the guy’s hand.”

Bergen’s pacifism apparently made an deep impression on at least one spectator. Several days later, a pastor from a Ugandan Christian church told Irby that a former Ugandan national team member of the highest stature had been amazed that the Vanguards didn’t retaliate after overly aggressive play.

Then Bergen’s gesture cliched it: the former player decided to convert right in the stands.

Irby wasn’t told the former player’s name and therefore couldn’t confirm the report, but that doesn’t diminish the power of the message.

“There are no pastors on our team,” Irby said. “We’re all just soccer players from all walks of life. Many of our guys aren’t comfortable standing in front a big group of people, so it’s exciting that they went the extra mile on the field and that it made a difference.”