LAGUNA BEACH : Team Gets Kick Out of Being State Champ

As their coach describes them, they’re a bunch of lionhearted knuckleheads who have made history in Laguna Beach, becoming the first soccer team in this city to snag an American Youth Soccer Organization state championship.

“This was the most talented group of kids I’d ever coached in my entire coaching career,” Jeff Brown said of the 12- and 13-year-old boys. “Every team we played was bigger and faster than us.”

Brown, the Laguna Beach All-Stars and most certainly their parents are wallowing in the glory of a triumphant season that included 12 wins--seven of them shutouts--and a tie.

And no losses.

Brown remembers before the decisive game last month when a member of the opposing Palm Springs team--then the reigning champs--asked if the smaller Laguna Beach boys were part of a division of 10- and 11-year-olds.

Humiliating, sure, but Brown said the comment worked in his team’s favor.

“We used it to motivate them a little bit, you bet,” he said.

“We got to the finals against the best team out there and we just tore them apart,” Brown recalled gleefully. “We totally dominated the game, from the opening kickoff.”

It was not always so.

Five years ago, when most of the 14 team members began playing together as 7- and 8-year-olds, they could barely score a point, Brown said.

Eventually, some parents began forming teams for off-season tournaments. The boys studied the competition, stepped up the practice schedule and began doing drills to improve their skills, said David Krinsky, whose son Aaron is on the team.

“We were tired of losing as badly as we did,” he said. A new season rolled around; the team’s improvement was not spectacular.

By their third year together, though, Brown said, the team began to “surprise a few people” and won in the Orange County region, the first Laguna Beach team to do so. The next year, they held their own.

Then, in anticipation of what they figured could be their jackpot season this year, the parents enlisted Brown, a soccer coach at Laguna Beach High School.

By now the boys were as hungry as their parents. “They wanted it as much as the parents wanted it,” he said.

Team members practiced, watched professional soccer videos and studied soccer strategy books.

Ultimately, Brown said, the boys--who also played baseball and basketball together--won because they clicked as a team.

“They go to school together, they played soccer together for years,” he said. “It either makes them enemies or close friends, and we were lucky these guys were close friends.”

Brown said he’s not likely to forget 1995 and the thrill of that final game against Palm Springs.

“As a coach, it was one of the most satisfying things I’ve every been involved in,” he said.

“They had a lion’s heart, definitely.”