 | |
| Summer Edition | |
| |
| Summer Edition | |
BY A. DUNLAP-SMITH
Oblivious of the hot summer sun, boys and girls aged seven to 17 drill intensely in groups dotting Columbia University's Baker Field Sports Complex at the northern tip of Manhattan. They are here to hone their skills at the New York City Soccer Academy, the increasingly popular summer sports camp run for two weeks in June and August by Columbia soccer coaches and staff.
"Our camp is no summer baby sitting service," says Dieter Ficken, founder and one of three directors of the N.Y.C. Soccer Academy, and head soccer coach at Columbia. "We're here for the young players dedicated to improving their skills, enthusiastic about the game and willing to learn and have fun." From the look on the faces of the Academy's campers this morning, dedication, enthusiasm and will are in abundant supply.
Now in its fourth summer, the N.Y.C. Soccer Academy's success reflects not only the rise of the game's popularity with Americans--particularly with girls and women, as evidenced by the huge numbers of live and television spectators for the Women's World Cup--but also an even more recent phenomenon. Soccer is at last becoming a city game in America.
"Our first year I printed up some leaflets and handed them out to kids playing in the parks--29 signed up," Ficken says. "But on the first day of camp, 59 showed up; I sprinted for the phone to get my friends to come and help out." That answered the question Ficken has asked himself since arriving in Brooklyn as a boy from Germany and finding that he was the only one with a soccer ball in the park: Will soccer ever catch on in the city? Although some are from the area's traditional soccer strongholds of Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey, most of the 150 to 200 players the Academy welcomes to each of its four week-long camps come from the five boroughs.
Soccer in this country was until recently more a suburban--even a rural--game, thanks to the greater supply of both space and funds. A case in point is the U.S. National Women's Team. With few exceptions, the team is stocked with players who learned the game outside a major American city's limits.
The Academy's rapid growth, however, is proof that in America the game's new frontier is the city street. "The demand around here for what we offer--the best facilities in the area and access to top coaches--is so big that we could run this camp for eight weeks of the summer rather than four," says Kevin McCarthy, an academy director and head coach of Columbia's women's team. This year, however, a concession was made to the demand. The directors added a third week in June to accommodate public school students whose school year ends too late for them to get into the Academy's June session.
Dani Bernfeld, 15, is one such student. Although she, with a dozen teammates from Manhattan's Hunter High, signed up for the August session, Bernfeld couldn't hold off til then. "I just wish I started soccer when I was five years old," she says after coming to the sidelines for a breather during an afternoon scrimmage between teams mixed with girls, boys and coaches. She likes everything about soccer, she says, but in particular, "I like it because it gets my aggressions out."
Academy coaches choose teams for scrimmages based on players' level of skill--not their age, size or sex--to foster competition and push the players to progress. Rachel Cotton and Avra Siegel, both 17, from Manhattan private schools Brearley and Trinity, respectively, balked at the suggestion that playing soccer with and against boys might be disadvantageous to them. "It's a lot more fun to play with guys," Cotton says, "because you have to run faster and be more aggressive." Siegel added: "The skill level is higher when you play on a team with guys or against a team with them, which helps you improve faster." As if on cue, a Hunter teammate of Bernfeld's then executed a textbook sliding tackle nearby, stripping her male adversary of the ball.
As for the boys, they didn't care who played as long as the level of play was high enough test their abilities and improve their game. Twelve-year-old Read Flusser from the Collegiate School on the Upper West Side has been invited to try-out for the regional team in the Olympic Development Program. The Academy offers him coaching and the challenge of competing against older players with skills equal to or better than his own. "If you want to get better, coming here helps," he says; "the coaches are good and you play all day."
The Academy is structured so that the mornings are devoted to practicing a skill: Monday is for dribbling, Tuesday for passing and receiving, and so on. At midday, campers break for lunch and study game films. The afternoons are for testing what was learned during the morning in both full- and half-field games.
Although the number of campers varies somewhat from week to week, the ratio of players to coaches is never more than 10 to one. "We want each one of the people who comes here to get as much individual attention as possible," McCarthy says, "so if we have more players in a week we just bring in more coaches."
This summer the Academy has among the members of its staff the former head coach of the National Men's Team of Trinidad and Tobago, the present head of Trinidad's National Women's Team, the coach of one of Holland's professional club teams, a coach and former player in the pro league of the Latin American country Colombia, a player on New York-New Jersey's Cosmos professional team, as well as many past and present soccer players from Columbia and other area colleges.
Cory Martin, a senior and a defender on Columbia's varsity soccer team, spent two weeks in June with the age 7-and-under group called the "wee-boys." It was as much an opportunity to learn as to teach, he says. "I try to make it fun for them to pick up basic soccer skills but it can be a challenge sometimes, so I ended up asking my mom, who teaches kindergarten, for pointers."
Regardless of age or skill, the Academy's campers are getting what they signed up for, as their parents attest. "It's a great program," Columbia professor of political science Charles Cameron says while waiting at Amsterdam and 116th Street for the bus from Baker Field to drop off his daughter Eliza, 9, and son Ian, 6. "They always come back telling me they've learned all sorts of new tricks." Although Eliza is at the Academy for the second year in a row, her schedule permits her only one week there this summer. "But she really would like to play more."
For information about the N.Y.C. Soccer Academy write or call Ken Torry, Chairman of Physical Education, 334 Dodge Fitness Center, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. 10027--(212) 502-3451.