Play Soccer Now, Learn Rules Later

On the green grass field, wearing shiny new uniforms in Crayola shades of blue and yellow and pink and red and silver, the littlest soccer players try.

They try to kick the ball in the right direction, or, for that matter, to kick it at all. They try to concentrate. To run without falling. To not lose a shoe or ponytail holder.

To not just sit right down on the ground when the breath goes out of them.

It was opening day in the K-league Saturday. Peewee soccer.

Ryan Weaver, 7, of the Fireballs, part of the Junior United Soccer Assn., pushes hard toward the goal, ball underfoot, sweat beads on his buzz-cut hair. He moves closer, closer, so close. Parents cheer. And then he stops and looks down at the ball and up again at the goalie. It is not a showdown. It is a moment of confusion.

“Kick it hard! Kick it hard!” yells the coach from the sideline.

Instead, Ryan doesn’t kick it at all. The excitement of the crowd deflates into chuckles and sighs.

For those who have somehow missed the soccer craze--a sport so popular in Orange County that 300 little kids were put on a waiting list last season by the American Youth Soccer Organization when it couldn’t find enough local fields to let everyone play--think T-ball with nonstop running. Think about those interminable baseball innings when the neophyte batter confronts a ball perched on a post and is told to swing away.

But picture it with a couple of dozen pairs of little legs aiming to put one little soccer ball in a net.

Of course, soccer has always been more ballet than the stops and starts of the most all-American of games.

There is the grace of World Cup play. The indelible image of the great Pele aloft, feet over head with the ball careening just so off his toes. Goal!

And then there is Saturday morning at Fairmont Elementary School in Yorba Linda, where hazy skies offer early-morning relief from the heat.

A little girl, hair in ribbon-tied pigtails, guards the net, bouncing up and down like a jumping bean at the slightest hint the ball is headed her way.

Waiting to go into the game, Jake Levine, 5, attempts to stand on a ball. He plops hard on his bottom and looks sheepishly around to see if anyone saw him.

“You know what to do, right?” shouts Fireballs coach Ted Ludford. “Kick the ball away from our goal!”

The ball seems knee-high to a ball handler. In his very first game, Jake is tentative. He kicks the ball a couple of times, but stages an attempted mutiny several times over. At the edge of the field, his mother, Maureen, turns him around and points him back to the action.

“There’s the ball, Jake!” she shouts. “Go get it!”

On an adjoining field, in a battle of sorts between the royal blue Waves and the baby blue Rockets, Thelma Park, great-grandmother, takes it all in under her wide-brimmed straw hat.

“We come to every game,” she says. “We’ve been soccer people ever since our grandson Jason was playing, and now he’s 20 years old.”

Park’s husband, Roy, 83, says they didn’t have soccer when he was growing up in Oklahoma but he’s come to think it is a fine game.

“We have a lot of fun,” he says.

Their great-granddaughter, Nikki Hinds, 6, ambles off the field after the final whistle, chewing on a strand of her long, corn-colored hair.

“She didn’t have so great of a game,” confides her great-grandmother about Nikki’s soccer debut.

“You did great, Honey,” she says seconds later, handing Nikki a promised treat, a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off.

And when it is all over, players everywhere in youth soccer run under a canopy of parents’ arms to the sound of cheers and shouts of encouragement. Some go through twice.

“I laugh at both sides. I cheer for both sides,” says Orlando Calleros, who has been a soccer dad for two years. “I just love seeing these kids play the game.”