Coach Builds Better Lives for His Players

The training regimen for young soccer players in Paraguay was not what we would call rigorous. Justo Pastor Frutos, a poor kid from Asuncion, joined a citywide league when he was 7, about the same age he started taking swigs of hard liquor at his father’s distillery. He started smoking cigarettes when he was 12 and eventually developed a four-pack-a-day habit, puffing like a fiend all season.

Frutos was still smoking at his high school, which allowed students to light up during class. Afterward, he and his friends would go out for drinks--with the teacher.

By the time he was 18, Frutos was physically and mentally wasted. Instead of becoming a soccer star, he had become an alcoholic with a constant, hacking cough.

The adolescent life of Justo Frutos had hit a dead end. How he found his way out is the story of a concerned American professor, a religious conversion, a long trek from Paraguay to Utah and the lifelong love of the professor’s daughter.

Today at 58, Frutos is a grandfather and a veteran soccer coach basking in the glory of victory. Since 1983, he’s been coaching men’s soccer at Santa Ana College, a team that hit an unprecedented winning streak in the 1990s. In the past five years, the Dons have taken three state championships and were crowned 1999 national champs by a unanimous vote of two-year college coaches--something no other community college men’s soccer team in California has achieved.

The Santa Ana team--also under the guidance of coaches Jose Vasquez and Frank Rea, who both played for Frutos--has not lost a game in two seasons. Last year, the team scored 146 goals while allowing opponents to score only 17. Composed primarily of Latino immigrant youths, the Dons have won the respect of their rivals.

“We have never in our history played a team as intelligent and deep as Santa Ana,” said Canada College Coach Frank Magnolia. “They are awesome.”

If his fellow coaches tend to the players’ skills and stamina, Frutos tends to their spirit. Many are young migrant men on the move, enduring hardships far from home. In their environment, they could easily lose their way in life.

“I’ve been there,” said Frutos, recalling the lack of opportunity and hopelessness of his own early years. “We have many young men here in this city who have practically the same situation I did.”

Ignorance is their enemy, says Frutos, as much as drugs or gangs. So he tells the team members they didn’t come to college to play soccer. They came to study. Soccer will one day fade from their lives; an education will last forever.

On road trips, Frutos requires his players to bring only two items: deodorant and schoolbooks. Changing underwear is optional; studying two hours per day is mandatory.

Whenever possible, Frutos rents a large hotel room for himself, which he turns into a study hall. When a big room isn’t available, he says, the players sit on the toilet and curl up in the bathtub with their texts.

Their coach also prepares a booklet of inspirational readings for bedtime. He includes poetry, self-improvement tips and stories of triumph over tribulation, patterned in part after the popular series of motivational books, “Chicken Soup for the Soul.”

On the night before a semifinal in San Diego last year, Frutos shared a little rhyme he had learned in 1964 when he first came to this country. In response to God’s command to build a better world, the poem starts, a doubting voice wonders how. The world is so large and complicated and “I so small and useless am.” The voice despairs:

“There’s nothing I can do.”

And God in all his wisdom said: “Just build a better you.”

The following day, sophomore Jose Retiz scored the winning goal, setting his team on the road to their second consecutive state championship. He then ran off the field and proudly lifted his jersey. On his white T-shirt underneath, he had written the slogan with a marker: “Just build a better you.”

Frutos can’t disguise his own pride when he retells the story.

“These are not people who are just running after a ball,” he says of his players. “There is a lot of substance to the boys. A lot of substance.”

Frutos says he helps his players discover their own potential. And he doesn’t hesitate when asked who in his life helped him do the same.

His mentor was a man from Montana, a professor of agricultural engineering assigned to the U.S. Agency for International Development office in Asuncion. His name was Halver Skinner, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The wayward young man served as interpreter for the American, translating both Spanish and Guarani, the Indian language. But when Skinner asked his employee to define his purpose in life, Frutos had no answer in any language.

His boss pressed him to analyze his aimlessness. By then, Frutos had already realized he had to change or he’d soon be dead without leaving a trace of his presence on Earth.

He changed, all right, and radically. Frutos, who was raised Catholic, converted to Mormonism and went on a mission for the church in neighboring Uruguay.

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Along the way, he also fell in love with Kathryn Skinner, the boss’ daughter.

Her father frowned upon the relationship. He wanted to help the young man, but maybe not that much. Still, Frutos had a way to get close to the object of his affections: He was teaching her Spanish at night.

Frutos used to boast that he only taught his pretty pupil the words he wanted to hear.

After a year, Kathryn returned to the States to study elementary education at Brigham Young University in Utah. Her suitor wound up in the same state, but he asserts he didn’t come to the U.S. following a woman.

“I came following a dream,” Frutos says. “I came to this country and I was going to get rich and never again be in need of anything.”

He borrowed money for a flight to Miami, then trekked across country on a Trailways bus. He was 23, so unfamiliar with America he didn’t even know the bus had a bathroom in the back. He spent part of the 76-hour trip in excruciating waits for the next rest stop.

Frutos found many people who helped him get established in his new country. Fellow Mormons found him room and board and got him jobs cleaning kitchens and milking cows. One benefactor even paid his out-of-state tuition for one quarter at Utah State University, where Frutos got a bachelor’s degree in education.

In 1968, he was recruited by the Santa Ana Unified School District to teach Spanish and English as a second language at Willard Junior High School. Later, he taught math and coached soccer at Santa Ana High School.

When Frutos headed for California, he was no longer alone. Two years earlier, in the summer of ‘66, he and Kathryn had married. They’ve been together 34 years and have six children, ages 31 to 16, and six grandchildren.

Mrs. Frutos doesn’t sugarcoat her husband’s accomplishments. As with all successful men, she says, his devotion to his work cost him precious time away from his family.

Still, she admires the way he has coached and counseled scores of young men for three decades in Orange County, with scant attention from the press.

“He not only has a winning soccer team,” she told me Thursday, “but he has influenced young men in a way that has caused them to turn their lives around.”

Soccer is conflict, Frutos tells his young proteges. Opponents will try mightily to deflect you from your goal. They will attack you, block you, even steal from you. It is up to you, the coach continues, to resolve that conflict.

And so it is in the real world.

“The obstacles you will find, whatever they may be--prejudice, discrimination, difficulty with language--will be things you will have to get around and solve,” he tells them.

For Frutos--once a kid who kicked cans around in his bare feet on the dead-end streets of Asuncion--learning the secrets of soccer became the story of his life.

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.