The Difference Makers

A playoff soccer game at Bell High involving two of the better teams in the Los Angeles City Section was played Tuesday that was unremarkable in every way except for what transpired on the sidelines.

There giving pep talks and plotting strategy from the center of huddled teen-aged boys on both sides were two middle-aged female coaches.

Nancy Carr-Swaim and Norma Escobedo are no strangers to soccer, or to coaching. Carr-Swaim has guided the Belmont High boys’ team for 17 seasons. Escobedo, whose team won, 1-0, is in her eighth campaign directing the boys from Bell.

But it isn’t often that they compete against a coach they can so closely relate to.

While finding a woman coaching boys is not unusual in youth leagues, this season Carr-Swaim and Escobedo were the only two female boys’ varsity soccer coaches in the City Section.

They don’t consider themselves trailblazers, but others do.

“Seeing what they’re doing can have a positive impact on a young woman,” said Becky Heidesch, president of Women’s Sports Services, a Huntington Beach-based company that specializes in sports marketing and career development. “It might make a young woman think, ‘Hey, this is something I can do as well.’ ”

Skeptics need only to listen to the boys coached by the women.

Carlos Lopez, a senior who is the leading scorer on Bell’s team, was mentored mostly by men in youth leagues. Now, after working with Escobedo, he says he’d rather be coached by a woman.

“She’s very supportive,” he said. “Most of the men were always screaming at you. If you made a mistake, they would take you out of the game and use bad language with you. But she never does that. She’s always very supportive.”

Nestor Galvez, a junior who was Belmont’s leading scorer, similarly described Carr-Swaim.

“She knows her stuff and she’s patient,” he said. “And she’ll listen to us. If someone has something to say, she’ll listen to them and try to improve her knowledge if she can.

“If you question [men coaches], they take it all personally. They take it like it’s an insult, but she’s not like that.”

Not that it’s always smooth going.

Escobedo recalls earlier in her career being told by a father that he would not allow his son to be coached by a woman. And both women say they were routinely slighted by referees who unwittingly walked past them in search of the head coach for pre-game meetings.

“They would go to my bench and talk to the nearest male authority-looking figure,” Escobedo said. “They would invariably ask a school administrator or an assistant coach if they were the head coach.”

Jorge Ramos, the lead official Tuesday, spoke highly of both coaches, saying he was impressed with their work in previous games. “They’re excellent coaches,” Ramos said. “They know how to keep their composure and keep their teams calm.”

Carr-Swaim, 52, is barely 5 feet tall and nearly all of her players tower over her. She was the more animated and vocal of the coaches Tuesday, her blond pony-tail bobbing around a white visor as she paced the sidelines and rasped encouragement to her players.

She didn’t play high school soccer, taking up the sport when she joined a recreation league in her late 20s. She had been a gymnast at North Hills Monroe High, Pierce College and Cal State Northridge.

Carr-Swaim said she never envisioned herself coaching, but when Belmont administrators offered her a job as a physical education instructor and boys’ soccer coach in the fall of 1987, she accepted.

“I was overwhelmed,” she said of her first season, “but I did my best to do my job justice.”

Limited in soccer experience and unable to speak Spanish among predominantly Latino students, Carr-Swaim worried about being taken seriously as a disciplinarian. Trying to win the players’ acceptance, she said she occasionally allowed them to slip out of control.

In her first season, she had notable run-ins with two players who made insults of a sexual nature.

“There were plenty of times when she came home in tears,” said Paul Swaim, Nancy’s husband of 17 years. “The kids just didn’t show a lot of respect for her.”

That started to change when Carr-Swaim guided her team to the City Section championship game in her second season. Belmont lost to San Pedro, but the coach had earned respect.

Since then, Belmont has returned to the championship game four more times. The Sentinels, who finished 12-4-3 this season, were City champions in 1997, co-champions in 1996 and also won in 1994, though that title was stripped because they used an ineligible player.

“Playing with girls and coaching boys is very different,” she said of her experience. “Girls are more team-oriented and more sensitive to criticism. Boys are often more individually minded, but you can be harsher with them emotionally than you can with girls.”

Escobedo, 46, the second oldest of seven siblings, moved to Los Angeles from Mexicali with her family when she was 10 and grew up playing soccer with her brothers.

She was the coach when Bell fielded its first girls’ soccer team in 1988 and stayed with that program until taking over as boys’ coach in the fall of 1996.

Soft-spoken and thoughtful, she rarely raised her voice when coaching Tuesday -- even when three of her players were penalized, receiving yellow cards during a scoreless first half.

In the early years guiding Bell’s girls’ team, Escobedo said she concentrated on basic fundamentals, such as the proper technique that should be used when kicking the ball. From that, she progressed to designing complex formations and strategies for boys’ players who had been brought up playing soccer from the time they could walk.

Hers was a quick and successful transition.

Bell advanced to the City title game in Escobedo’s second season. “They kind of took me along for the ride,” she said of that team. “I had a good group of players.”

She does this season too. Bell (13-0-7) will now play a quarterfinal game against defending City champion Locke (11-2-5) on Thursday at Bell. A victory there and one more after that would put the Eagles in their second championship game with Escobedo.

At least one otherwise impartial observer will be rooting for them.

“If I had to lose to anyone,” Carr-Swaim said Tuesday, “I’m glad it was to her.”