Scott Swanson
The American Youth Soccer Organization is quickly becoming the primary gateway to the pitch for local youngsters, with the discontinuance by the Boys and Girls Club of the majority of its age-group soccer programs, and local parents are working to drum up support necessary to hold AYSO games in Sweet Home.
John and Melanie Fassler, whose daughter Rebekah, 11, has played the last year for AYSO teams, are working to get local children signed up to play this fall, they said.
Rebekah stated playing soccer on Sweet Home Boys and Girls Club teams when she was 9, and she liked the game, her parents said. She has Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism, and she liked the constant action of soccer rather than T-ball, which she found boring.
“She just wanted to play,” Melanie Fassler said.
However, when the Fasslers tried to sign her up last fall, they discovered that the Boys and Girls Club was no longer offering soccer for children beyond second grade. That’s when they were introduced to AYSO, the largest single-entity youth soccer association in the United States, which has been establishing a firm foothold in Lebanon in recent years.
Duston Denver of Lebanon, commissioner of the local AYSO region, which includes Albany east Linn County, said things “have really taken off in the last two years” in Lebanon.
AYSO has been present in Albany for about 20 years, he said, but Lebanon parents formed a couple of teams a few years ago and the number of players has grown to almost match Albany’s.
“Along with that, people in Sweet Home started noticing and now Brownsville is joining. We’ve expanded a lot more than just Albany,” he said.
The local region had 96 teams last year, ranging from ages 4 to 18. Forty of those were in east Linn County – Lebanon and Sweet Home, and 56 in Albany. Now Brownsville, which had participated in a youth soccer organization based in Junction City, is joining as well.
“We served just under 1,000 kids last year,” Denver said. “We expect to serve more than 1,000 this fall. We’re hoping for more this year with Brownsville joining in, that it will continue to grow.”
Not only that, but spring soccer took root in Sweet Home for the first time in memory this year, with girls and boys Under-12 and Under-14 teams, and girls Under-10 and Under-18 teams.
“This is a new sport for the area,” said Ryan Regrutto, head coach of the Sweet Home High School boys team for the last two years and a former NCAA Division I and semi-pro soccer player.
“People are becoming educated to what the game is all about. A lot of kids are coming up throught the middle school programs and that’s making a big difference where they start.”
Regrutto said he’s had players who tried soccer for the first time in high school, either after having never played at all or after a long hiatus from the game.
“If some of these high school students had started much younger, they wouldn’t be having trouble competing,” he said. “If you’ve been playing soccer since you’re 6 years old, as opposed to starting in high school, there’s no comparison.”
A strength of the AYSO system is that coaches and referees undergo mandatory training before they are allowed on the field – even as volunteers, which they all are. Each team is required to provide referees, who are assigned to games throughout the season.
The increased instruction is improving the quality of play at the higher levels.
Denver said he grew up in Lebanon playing Boys and Girls Club soccer, then competed on a Lebanon High School team that never won “a single game.”
That’s changed, he said. The Warriors finished 2-9-3 last year.
“The high school program is doing pretty decent here in Lebanon,” he said. “We’re feeding them with players. This is just about getting kids on the ball, getting coaches trained. We’re giving them player development and teaching them the game.”
As a relative newcomer to the game, John Fassler said he’s found AYSO, which is entirely composed of volunteers, to be well-organized. He said he had to undergo 16 hours of training to coach and referees get “eight hours plus.”
“Plus, I took Safe-Haven training on line,” referring to an AYSO program that teaches safety and appropriate behavior with children, as well as other on-field issues.
Regrutto, whose daughter played on an Under-6 team last fall, her first experience in soccer, said he’s been “really impressed” with the strict “everybody plays” rule, the emphasis on safety and on fair play.
“It’s really nice to go to Lebanon on a Saturday and see a bunch of kids having a good time,” he said. “They’re not worried about winning or losing. For the advancement and development of these kids, that’s what they need.”
Fassler, who served a term on the Sweet Home School Board, said he’s become increasingly convinced that youngsters need to get involved in activities.
“Statistics do not lie,” he said. “The more a person is involved in organized, extracurricular activities like choir, band, drama, or extracurricular sports, teen pregnancy and school dropout rates go down dramatically. Grades go up a full letter. They start thinking, ‘Hey, other people are depending on me.’
“But if you want to have more kids involved in things, you have to have people who are going to step up and do these things.”
Melanie Fassler said she’s realized that children need physical activity to stay healthy.
“You hear the government saying we need to get kids more active because of childhood obesity,” she said. “Here you’re giving kids an opportunity to do something they’ve never done before. You’ve got volleyball, baseball, football. Not everybody is suitable for those sports. In soccer, a child just has to be able to run and kick a ball.”
John Fassler added that at one of the clinics he attended, a coach asked what it takes to play soccer.
“Other coaches mentioned jerseys, shin guards, cleats, goals. He held up a ball and dropped it. ‘That’s all you need to play soccer. If you have a ball, you can have a soccer game any place.’ When I heard that from him, it was like, ‘Wow, I never put it in that perspective.’”
Both Denver and the Fasslers said the goal is to get games in Sweet Home.
“All games this year were played in Lebanon,” Denver said. “Our goal is to have Sweet Home teams play home games in Sweet Home. The main thing we need is volunteers – parents and others to step up and referee and help paint fields and make that happen.”
That’s the Fasslers’ goal too.
“For us to be able to have home games, we need parents and coaches, assistant coaches and referees,” Melanie Fassler said. “From there we need to go out and talk to the school district and the city about fields.”
Regrutto said he would also like to see more Sweet Home residents get involved.
“It’s a great sport and it’s relatively safe,” he said. “I’m really excited that it’s finally getting a little bit of a foothold.
“Right now we have a mix of kids from Sweet Home playing with kids from all over. It would be nice to have kids here who can work and practice together, and travel together to play together.”