Winning Is Business as Usual for the Stars

The manager talks about signing new players. One of the team’s sponsors is the Italian soccer equipment giant, Lotto. There is a monthly newsletter. The coach is paid. Team scholarships are available. Two players are in a Nike commercial.

If it sounds a little more serious than your average girls’ 12-and-younger soccer team, that’s because the Reseda-based Valley United Stars play the game a little differently.

They play to win. And usually, they do.

On Saturday, they will play a team from Torrance in a California Youth Soccer Assn. State Cup semifinal match in Huntington Beach. If the Stars win, they’ll play in yet another championship.

Until a nail-biting loss in January, the Stars had compiled an 81-game winning streak. Before “the loss,” as they refer to it, the team had won 14 consecutive tournaments, in addition to the State Cup championship. They also won their local club soccer league, playing “up” a year in the 13-and-younger age bracket, even though their players were all 10, 11 or 12.

They usually beat--and often, embarrass--same-age boys’ soccer teams they scrimmage against.

With so much emphasis on winning, what happens when a team this good loses? And how did this gaggle of undersized Valley girls grow into a feared and respected regional soccer juggernaut?

It is a sunny February Saturday in Huntington Beach. The Stars are warming up on a field at Ocean View High School, preparing for a quarterfinal State Cup match. The team’s 26-year-old coach, Terry Davila, walks between his players, issuing instructions and encouragement in his terse, earnest style.

Davila, who is also an assistant men’s soccer coach at Cal State Northridge, does not joke around much before the game. There is soccer to be played, and the parents pay him more than $600 a month to teach young girls to play it well.

Davila is not the only paid girls’ youth soccer coach around. Vic Fodor, a Stars dad and team manager, says, “Any club team that’s any good at all has a paid coach.” Some are paid a lot more than Davila, the parents say.

When Davila coaches, he does not rant or rave. He is quiet, questioning, reasoning. The girls like him. He teaches a simple style of soccer that many youth teams have trouble grasping: how to maintain ball possession. He preaches patience, directs players to search methodically for gaps in the opposition’s defense, to pass to the open player, to play intelligently.

Mostly, they do. The girls are all exceptional athletes; many participate in other organized sports. Almost all excel in school. They listen. They are coachable.

“They have high goals,” Davila says, “In everything. . . . They know it’s OK to compete hard against each other. A lot of times, we don’t tell girls to play as hard as boys play. These girls do.”

The quarterfinal game is an important one. It is against the one team that has given the Stars fits, the SoCal Blues--one of only a handful of teams to beat them in the past year and a half. The loss to the Blues five weeks ago still smarts. Parents blame it on bad referees and poor playing conditions.

Davila’s players don’t offer excuses. They lost. Period.

“I think we’re a little more stressed than the kids are,” says Patty Hayden, the official team mother, before the game. “All the way here, Bill [Patty’s husband] kept telling Celisse, ‘Make sure you do this,’ and ‘Celisse, don’t forget what coach said about that,’ and I said, ‘Bill! Come on! You’re making her nervous.’ ”

Another parent says she had trouble sleeping the night before.

They’ve invested a lot. There is Davila’s fee. There are tournament fees, league fees, referee fees. There are travel and hotel expenses during tournaments. There are doctors’ bills.

One parent, Susan Stone, estimates she and her husband spent $6,000 on Stars-related expenses last year, but says most parents would spend an average of $3,000 to $4,000 a year.

Emotions are pricey, too.

One team member broke her collarbone last season. She sat glowering on the sidelines for months, healing. Another Star sprained her wrist and pulled a groin muscle, twice. A trainer told her she was getting hurt because she was afraid--of getting hurt again.

So with so much at stake, yes, it’s nice to win.

The quarterfinal game opens fast, with the Stars getting off a strong shot on goal in the first 30 seconds. The Blues, a well-coached team in their own right, put on a passing clinic, moving the ball through midfield to come within long artillery range of the Stars’ goal. A Blues forward makes a dangerous run into the Stars’ penalty box, but the play fizzles.

Stars parent Sheila Lavery shook her head. “These guys are good,” she says. Then, in a whisper: “You know, they beat us a couple of weeks ago.”

At halftime, the score is 0-0. Parents look relieved. Players trot off the field in search of water.

In the second half, the Stars come out strong, sweeping the ball confidently from player to player, probing the Blues defense. Three times, Stars drive to the corner and send dangerous crosses arcing in front of the Blues’ goal. Three times, nobody connects.

With six minutes to go, the Blues get a free kick in Stars territory. The ball ricochets through a crowd of Stars defenders and lands near an open Blues player, who slaps it into the Stars’ goal. Shrieks of joy arise across the field.

“Oh my God,” groans a Stars parent, hanging his head. “Oh my God.”

The Stars push hard for the rest of the game, to no avail. They dominate, but the Blues have defeated them. Again.

After a private, 15-minute chat with his team, Davila grabs some gear and prepares to head home. The Stars, still alive in the tournament, go on to win a critical quarterfinal playoff game the next day, sending them into this weekend’s State Cup semifinal. The Blues suffer a later loss and are knocked out of the competition.

“Hey, the emphasis is not on winning,” Davila says later. “How can you be upset when a team plays as well as we did, but loses? They played their hearts out. There’s a bigger picture here. That’s what I try to show them.”

Parents gathered in small groups, as if at a wake.

“It happens,” says Fodor. “We’ve beaten these guys five times before now. For us, playing down here is always tough. We fight the referees every single time. That free kick shouldn’t have been called.”

For their part, the girls seem fine.

Christina Enea lumbered along behind her father toward the parking lot, her Lotto equipment bag slung heavily over one shoulder. She smiles wearily.

“Coach told us not to waste our energy getting down,” Christina says. “He said we played our game, and he used this really long word. I didn’t know what it meant, but I think he meant, it didn’t matter that we lost.”

Davila says the word he used was indicative. “I told them the outcome was not indicative of the way they played. Because they played beautifully. You wait until these girls get bigger. They’re going to be amazing.”

Girls youth soccer, itself, is getting bigger in America, and nowhere is it growing faster than in Southern California. Area youth soccer programs have produced a slew of women’s soccer powerhouses, from Huntington Beach native Joy Fawcett to Carin Jennings of Palos Verdes to Julie Foudy of Mission Viejo, all three of whom play on the U.S. National women’s soccer team.

The San Fernando Valley produces its share of stars too. Northridge native Cindy Daws exploded onto the collegiate soccer scene in 1993, setting a single-season scoring record at Notre Dame on her way to becoming the only freshman named a first-team All-American that year. Other Valley players are standouts at Pepperdine and Stanford universities.

Their success is due, in part, to increasingly sophisticated girls’ youth soccer programs like the one run by the Stars, says Anson Dorrance, who presides over the women’s soccer dynasty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“It’s amazing what’s happening to girls soccer in America,” says Dorrance, who coached the women’s national team to victory in the Women’s World Championship, held in China in 1991, and has won a record-breaking 13 NCAA women’s soccer championships as head coach at UNC.

“Youths are coming into the game at a collegiate level much better qualified. It’s the result of a larger player pool, and much, much better youth coaching and training.”

Dorrance doesn’t usually start tracking youth players until they are 16 or 17, but has made exceptions. Mia Hamm, the national team star, was recruited by Dorrance to play for the U.S. squad when she was 14, he says.

Suddenly, 12-and-younger doesn’t sound so young.

When members of the Stars are asked where they hope soccer will take them, almost all of them say the same thing: to the national team.

“I think almost all of us have that goal,” says a team member who asked not to be identified by name.

Because two Stars players were featured in a recent Nike television commercial--causing a ripple of discontent among team members and some parents--the team requested that, where possible, names of team members be kept out of this article, to preserve team unity.

What if they lose the State Cup tournament this weekend?

“It wouldn’t matter,” the player says. “This is a great team and we’re all good friends. We want to be good at everything we do. It’s funner winning, but if we lose . . . “

She grins and kicks at a ball, letting the thought go unfinished.

Tim May is a correspondent.