Tuesday, Jul. 08, 2008

City soccer scene continues to thrive

Editor’s note: This story is the third and final installment in sportswriter Andy Marso’s series highlighting the three sports in which Olathe is most dominant: football, softball and soccer. He examined Olathe’s rise to prominence in each sport, the youth programs that feed the city’s success and the potential for the high school teams in the future.

The wide expanses of green grass at the Olathe District Activity Center and College Boulevard Activity Center include four sections set aside in rare fashion.

There is no football played on those fields and they host no track and field events. They are carefully groomed and lined for one sport and one sport only: soccer. It’s an unusual wealth of beautiful venues that are proof positive that Olathe takes its high school soccer seriously.

“I talk about that a lot with my kids,” Olathe South coach Will Stoskopf said. “Those kids may go on to play college soccer at the (NCAA) D(ivision)-II or D-III level or NAIA, and they’re never going to have those kind of facilities again. We’re really fortunate to have those kind of facilities to play on. We tell the kids before big games to just soak it all in because it’s such a great opportunity that they have.”

With four soccer-only fields in the city, it’s conceivable that Olathe North, Olathe South, Olathe East and Olathe Northwest all could simultaneously host boys soccer games in the fall or girls soccer games in the spring.

If there were such a soccer-mad night in town, there’s a decent chance Olathe would go 4-0. Last fall, the four boys teams combined for a 49-20-5 record, and South finished as state runner-up. In the spring, the four girls teams combined for a 48-23-3 record, and East won the state championship.

It was a banner year for Olathe soccer — one that had been building for quite some time after starting from rather humble beginnings.

The early years

Soccer was a tough sell when Olathe High School started the city’s first boys team in 1980. Craig Jaggard was the first coach there before becoming Olathe South’s first coach the following year when that school opened.

Olathe High went winless in its first season and the following season, when the school became Olathe North, Terry Hair took over as coach with only slightly better results.

Soccer was still mostly a foreigner’s game. Olathe had little tradition in the sport, and the talent base just wasn’t there.

“We beat the bushes to get individuals to even come out for soccer,” Hair said. “Olathe was a football town back then.”

By the time the Kansas State High School Activities Association began operating a boys soccer state championship in 1986, though, Hair’s team had grown considerably better.

The Eagles got a lucky one-year boost from a Scottish exchange student who breezed into town and became an instant star on the pitch, spurring North to its first double-digit win season.

But the real breakthrough came in 1988, when Hair and the Eagles won the city’s first state soccer championship. It was a team of homegrown talent led by goalkeeper Sean Conder and forward Jim McMullen, who would go on to star at Rockhurst University and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, respectively.

In the next two decades Olathe’s boys teams would win four state titles. The city’s girls teams would collect five after the KSHSAA sanctioned their sport in 1993.

Hair said much of the credit for the turnaround is due to Rich Enochs and Merlin Ring, two men who helped build the youth soccer programs that thrive throughout the city today and feed talented, varsity-ready players into the high schools annually.

Ring and Enochs coached two of the city’s first two Premier teams, with rosters that included Conder, McMullen, Bart Putnam and others who later formed the backbone of the 1988 state title team.

“They were board members of the Olathe Soccer Club and instrumental in getting kids on youth teams and keeping those youth team kids together,” Hair said of Ring and Enochs. “By the time Mr. Enochs and Mr. Ring had developed some players like that I was lucky enough to inherit those talented athletes.”

The turning point

Ring and Enochs were unlikely candidates to lead Olathe’s rise to state soccer prominence. Neither had much of a background in the sport, but they got involved in coaching recreational soccer because their sons played.

Early on Enochs used the only resource he had: years of baseball coaching experience.

“The first year I drafted I just really took the younger brothers of all the kids I knew that were great baseball players,” Enochs said. “They were good athletes, so that worked out real well. Then we just started putting it together.”

At the time, Olathe’s youth players competed in the Johnson County Soccer League, formed in 1977.

It was mostly recreational, but in the early 1980s, some of the Johnson County teams began making the jump to Premier status, joining the Kansas Premier Soccer League to get the benefit of more travel and stiffer competition. In 1995 the Johnson County league and the KPSL joined forced to form the Heartland Soccer Association.

The organized youth soccer hierarchy, with Premier teams at the top, gradually lifted the talent level at the high schools.

“Once you got the Premier teams going, you could just see that was going to make everybody better,” Enochs said. “I took over from Jim Conder, Sean’s father. Jim was the first (Olathe) coach in Premier and then because of his work schedule I took over for him.”

Enochs’ first Premier team, an under-12 squad sponsored by Pizza Shoppe, was made up exclusively of Olathe players. When the team jumped to the under-14 level and began traveling more, Enochs added a handful of Latino players from Kansas City, Kan.

One of them, Carlos Rodriguez, came with an added benefit. His father, Ernesto, had played for the Mexican national team and became a valuable assistant coach.

The Pizza Shoppe squad quickly became competitive on the Premier level, winning tournaments as far away as Thunder Bay, Canada. Shortly thereafter, Ring, who was president of the Olathe Soccer Club in 1982, started up another Premier team to offer local athletes even more opportunities.

Enochs and Ring’s players, forged in the fire of year-round travel and competition, arrived at Olathe North and Olathe South fearless and highly skilled, and the city quickly became a force in high school soccer as well.

“We coached long enough to see our kids play high school ball,” Ring said. “There was no question that the high school teams benefited from the kids that had been playing since second grade or third grade.”

The ball keeps rolling

Enochs and Ring had no idea how quickly youth soccer would explode in Olathe and throughout Johnson County.

By the time the KSHSAA began hosting a girls soccer state tournament in 1993, there were already girls from across the county playing for clubs. Not surprisingly, no team from any other part of Kansas has won in the 16 Class 6A state championships since then.

The area’s soccer influence continues to grow. When the Johnson County Soccer League started in 1977, it had about 600 total players. This year the Olathe Soccer Club, now called the Kansas Rush, boasted 3,200 players on its own.

“It’s totally amazing,” Enochs said. “I knew we were kind of the pioneers, but I never thought it would grow to the extent that it has now. It’s really a great situation.”

As the number of players has skyrocketed, so has the level of coaching they’re receiving. Dan Naidu, academy director for the Kansas Rush, said that all of the Rush coaches who work with competitive-level players have playing experience at least at the college level, and some have played professionally.

Many of Olathe’s top recent high school players, like Katie O’Keefe, Alyssa Rhodes, Mark Saxby and Tim Lyons came through the Rush ranks. Naidu said the club takes pride in its alumni and in being part of the nine state soccer titles Olathe’s boys and girls have won.

“We pay attention to the high school season,” Naidu said. “We go to the games sometimes after training, and we take an interest in how they’re doing in the high school season.”

Olathe players certainly aren’t restricted to the Rush, either. In fact, many of next year’s varsity players will have cut their teeth with nearby organizations like the Blue Valley Soccer Club, the Kansas City Comets or the Kansas City Legends.

The level of coaching in those clubs is similarly high, giving Olathe players even more access to excellent training year-round. MidAmerica Nazarene University head coach Kevin Wardlaw also coaches several of the Legends’ top teams.

“In the Olathe area, if your top-level (high school) players aren’t playing club, it’s strictly by decision,” Wardlaw said. “It’s not like they’re sitting there going, ‘Oh, well, we couldn’t find a team to play for.’”

Wardlaw said that the club soccer scene was so strong in Johnson County that players from as far away as Manhattan were joining teams in the area for the competition.

The convenient access that Olathe players have to so many quality coaches and organizations is tightly intertwined with the success of the city’s high school teams.

“These guys that are top-level players are playing club nine months out of the year,” Wardlaw said. “The only three months they don’t are when they’re playing for their high school teams. ... The success that our high schools in Olathe are having is directly associated with the fact that their best players are being trained nine months of the year by professional coaches.”

The tradition that began with Enochs and Ring’s Premier teams growing into the 1988 state championship Olathe North team continued through this year and is likely to continue in the near future.

The local clubs are still thriving and developing plenty of future high school stars to keep Olathe on top.

“The talent’s always there,” Naidu said. “We’ve grown as a club, so we like to say every year that we’re getting better and the players are getting better.”

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