Chasing amateur soccer dreams requires sharing air mattresses and eating exclusively at Wawa

I could have killed him. I swear to God I could have killed him. He used to lay there so peacefully, snoring and turning over in such a self-satisfied fashion. As if I couldn’t have just suffocated him with a pillow Desdemona-style.

We slept in the same bed, or rather, A.R. slept and I spent most of the night trying to, before eventually dozing off for one or two hours around 5 a.m. Then I would wake at 7 or 8, walk through the living room in a blanket burrito, tip-toeing around the air mattress and real mattress that Frankie and Jordan slept on, laughing at Miguel and his brother Uriah being curled up in the fetal position in their respective couch space — which is much funnier than it should be because they’re both incredibly short, so they look like actual children in their sleep — and drinking whatever juice was left in the kitchen before going outside to the back porch.

After about an hour of sitting alone outside in the cool summer air, A.R. would join me (we never came to the truth on what the letters of his name stood for).

Miguel came outside soon after and took part in the conversation. He was always shirtless, and waddled side to side like someone who was constantly injured or exhausted. Which, to be fair, he always was, and I sympathized because I oscillated between the two, as well.

It stayed like that, the three of us outside, until lunch time or practice. We would eat and play and return to our oasis. This happened almost every day, even when we had games. We sat on the back porch all day and only truly went inside when it was time to sleep. It was the only thing to do in Lehigh Valley.

We each had our motivations for being there. I was coming back from a trial in Turkey and was told to wait until the fall for a contract offer. Uriah was using the summer to get into match fitness and make one final push for his professional dreams. Miguel and A.R. were going into their final collegiate year.

I met the two brothers years ago at a private training facility in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Uriah and I especially became close after training and recovering from injuries together. We’re also both left-footed and have to stick together in solidarity. My bond with Miguel stems from us sharing many creative and intellectual interests —he’s written a book already — and we also share the same narcissism.

I was introduced to A.R. when I picked him up from the bus station for a January training camp that the brothers had organized for their friends. He spent the entire ride making fun of any and everybody, something that speaks to me on a spiritual level.

The Lehigh Valley adventure was Miguel’s idea, in the same vein as the training camp: for fitness, improvement, and fun. It was another way for him to hang out with friends who he’d been separated from by school and soccer.

Miguel knew the Lehigh Valley United Sonic coach from his academy days and offered to bring in some good players to help the team. So, this April he called A.R. and I with the simple proposal of playing soccer with friends in “Philadelphia.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time: joining together to beat up on PDL defenders before we all went our separate ways (the PDL is the Premier Development League, the top level of amateur soccer in the U.S.). We were all acknowledging that this was the last chance for all of us to play on the same team.

But when we arrived at a two-bedroom house an hour and a half outside of Philadelphia proper, to be shared between 10 people, the situation was quickly reminiscent of growing up in poverty and having to share beds with siblings, cousins, and friends. We slept two to a bed and those without actual mattresses made due with spaces on the furniture.

A.R. and I slept in one, Carl and one of our Spanish teammates slept in the other, two people were in the basement. Frankie, Jordan, Uriah, and Miguel slept in the living room. Frankie’s air mattress always deflated at night, so he was basically sleeping on the floor.

The team couldn’t secure a good practice field. Only a few players on the team had cars, and some refused to drive anyone but their immediate friends — which led to many being late for practice everyday. And when we did train, we went through the most elementary of passing drills. Kicking the ball against a wall for 30 minutes on our own would have been much more effective than the sessions we were put through.

The coach was remedial and played favorites, always starting these two Spanish forwards (a decision which the first few losses proved hinged on the illogical idea that they must be good because they were from Spain) even as the evidence on the field showed otherwise. They dribbled into dead-ends, only passed to each other, and refused to move in any substantial way until the ball was at their feet.

The coach made even more maddening in-game decisions: once he subbed out A.R. at halftime of a game where he was the best player on the field on the grounds that he didn’t like his attitude. He played Miguel all around the front line, not to maximize his ability but to accommodate the Spaniards’ ineptitude and, as hypocritical as it is for me to say this, their inability to defend.

I arrived late to Lehigh and, after he had promised I’d influence the team, the coach refused to play me. When he finally decided to sub me in, it was in the 86th minute of a losing game.

I refused to go in at first. Not using me entirely was fine, but to sub me in after making two other attacking substitutions, sending in players whose talents maxed out at the fact that they were familiar with the coach, that was plain disrespectful. When I eventually relented and joined the fray, I intentionally let the ball go past me and back to the opposition during a last-ditch counterattack. After the game I went back to the house, packed, booked a flight for the next day, and went home in the morning.

Uriah sprained his MCL in his left knee two games into the season and barely played the whole summer. He spent the time being disgusted and making ridiculous jokes about our situation. Miguel was exhausted and frustrated at having to run full-field sprints every game to cover for the Spanish forwards.

They came back to Detroit a few weeks after I did. A.R. stayed, the coach promised him that he would get looks from professional teams and that if he just endured, the end of the journey would be fruitful. The team kept losing and nothing came of his suffering.

I should have still killed A.R. before I left. It would’ve been kinder. I would have gotten away with it without much effort. Lehigh Valley was a wasteland. There were 10 of us in a house without internet, in the most Suburban area of Lehigh (a girl that I went on a date with there told me that the most fun thing to do was to go to the lake. Not as her personal opinion, but an agreed notion by everyone who lived there. Fuck the lake.) and the routine of breakfast, practice, and walking to Wawa for dinner had turned us into zombies. Wawa was survival. Wawa was life.

Because I’m a benevolent soul, I let them both live. I even trained with Miguel to get him ready for the college season. Last weekend I went to watch them play against each other in their final collegiate meeting.

Miguel started the game. A.R. was on the bench — apparently he was still being disciplined for taking an ill-advised trip to Miami before the season, an incident for which he had already served a suspension. Yet, the coach didn’t play him. He has played less than 40 minutes total three games since being allowed to participate again.

It was a typical college soccer game: lots of frantic running, loose touches, defensive mistakes, and preventable goals. Regular time ended at 2-2, and A.R.’s team would go on to win on a goal in overtime. It was a header from a free kick that went straight at the keeper, and as if he was just awakening from a nightmare, the keeper panicked, flapped at it, and helped to push the ball into his own net.

Miguel spent the first half reliving his Lehigh days for his team. The biggest criticism of his game has always been that he doesn’t defend. It’s a stereotypical vice for creative, attacking players everywhere — I used to get it, Uriah does, A.R. did, as well. Sometimes it’s valid. When he’s tired, he zones out. But we really do despise defending, as do most attacking players.

But the weird thing about that in American soccer, which is evident in the college game, is that defending is a synonym for running a lot. Not with purpose, or picking moments to close down players or setting defensive traps in parts of the field, but a general fetish for movement. Even if it means that the player is exhausting himself doing unnecessary work while never getting the ball. It’s chaos for the sake of appearances.

At Lehigh, Miguel had a game where he didn’t do too much attacking but ran around feverishly by the coach’s orders. We lost the game, because there was no plan beyond chasing the ball down, yet the coach told him that it was his best performance of the season.

In the first half as I watched him, he ran around a lot. Miguel’s team went down 1-0. In the second, the coach switched him from the left to the right wing, because the right back was much more capable than the left back, which allowed him more freedom to go forward.

Miguel came alive and his performance in that half was a big reason that they almost came back to win. The problem was that once he tired towards the end of the game, their attacking impetus died. He was their focal point, but by the 80th minute he was stretching to prevent cramps in his calves.

A.R. cut a lonely figure watching all of this from the bench. He was told to warm up at the start of the second half, but never came into the game.

He reminded me of my time at Lehigh. Of sitting and watching less talented players get a chance to influence the game while you serve time for an unclear transgression, and the coach never deems it necessary to explain the way back into his good graces.

But there’s a huge difference between my situation then and his now. I could leave, and I did. I was not obligated by anything to stay in an unhealthy and unhappy situation. I owed the coach nothing. A.R. can’t do that.

Being in school, he’s under the control of the college coach, a combination of a second parent and a dictator. The college coach is not only tasked with winning games, but also raising and turning his athletes into “good” men. The definition of “good” being subjective to his desires. He’s their moral leader and protector, which means that sometimes he has to discipline them harshly for their own good.

Someone like A.R. also suffers from a much more insidious plight. His attitude. I share the same problem and so do many minority soccer players, who grew up in poor neighborhoods. Rivaldo was infamous for it. It’s not exactly crass behavior, but it’s a very blunt, arrogant, and individualistic disposition. That is as much of a survival tactic as walking to Wawa for two months straight.

We talk shit, we’re fatalistically prideful, we’re hedonistic — because good times are usually rare and need to be devoured before the bad moments return — and we generally have a problem with authority. He grew up in the South Side of Chicago, I grew up in the West Side of Detroit in the early 2000s. Miguel and his brother grew up a few minutes away from me. These places condition you.

Attitude is often detrimental and inciting, inseparable from the person and his talents. It’s because of that attitude that he can beat defenders with ease and without fear. (I don’t even take their efforts seriously. I have a habit of laughing while dribbling.)

You can’t try to stifle that attitude in one aspect of his life, without killing it everywhere else. A lot of coaches in the professional world understand this — many still do not, for matter of ego and the obvious racial aspect of it, especially in America — or they’re forced to do so because they need the players. College coaches, from my personal experience, do not.

So, you have the coach as a parent/dictator against the talented but problematic player, who is coming from a place of hardship and desperately needs to succeed in soccer, for whom U.S. soccer has already done a fine job of restricting access. That mixture could only ever result in the player watching from the sideline, unsure what he did wrong, how long he will be punished, and afraid to speak up or get clarification in order not to jeopardize his future.

The same happened with me in college. I stormed out of practice for a silly reason and was met with an outsized silly punishment: six games and no opportunity to train with the team. The memory was why I had to leave Lehigh. I could never be in that trap again.

A.R. couldn’t leave, so he sat and watched everyone else play. After the game, Miguel, Uriah, and I teased him for “doing so much on the field.” We complimented him on his sitting and his technique in warming up. He laughed it off and said obviously that he must not be good enough. “What can I do?”

He joked that the team bus should leave him behind, since they didn’t need him anyway.

Later that night, we exchanged texts that concluded with me threatening to fight him if he didn’t endure and keep going forward. There was no other choice. This year would be a tiny blade of of grass in the lush field of his successes.

The next day, I went to brunch with Miguel. We talked about the game and his inability to score a goal if he can’t beat the defense and the keeper first. You can bank on him hitting the post at least twice every match. He revealed that coaches have been complimenting him on his defensive work rate this season and his stock has risen because of it. They like when he runs around. And also that some have been asking if he was going to stay an extra year since he had one more year of eligibility left.

I joked that if he did, we should all try to play for Lehigh Valley again. To live in the same house, practice on bad fields, and sit on the back porch all day. And, of course, to walk to Wawa for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He didn’t even laugh. He just said very seriously that he would kill me if we ever went to Wawa again.