In the fall of my eighth-grade year, my dad, my sister, and I took my grandfather to his last Notre Dame soccer game. His health had worsened and dementia was starting to set in. Grandpa Charlie looked at me and said, “Chris, you started playing soccer about three years ago, right?”
I was stunned.
I was always “Christian” in our family. Never Chris. And I had been playing the sport for about seven years—Grandpa Charlie had helped introduce me to it.
I didn’t know what to say. I told him I had played travel soccer for about three years, hoping that was what he meant. I’ll never know. He died within five months of that day. The man who fed my passion for the game couldn’t remember how much the sport had shaped my life and then, all at once, he was gone.
i don’t recall exactly why I started playing soccer. When I was three years old I liked to kick a blue playground ball at a tree in our front yard. I didn’t know soccer; I knew how to kick.
For my fourth birthday I got a gift from my aunt that would change my life: my first soccer ball. My mother enrolled me in classes through South Bend Parks and Recreation, where we played on a gym floor. My best skill was passing. I didn’t understand the rules of the game; I just did what I was told.
In January of my first-grade year, my father, a U.S. Army Major, was deployed to Bosnia. Grandpa Charlie stepped in. As an employee at the University of Notre Dame, he got free admission to “minor” sporting events like soccer. I began to understand soccer strategy at those evening contests I attended with my grandfather. I began to get a feel for the game.
I got a taste for it, too. The food trucks sold elephant ears, and the stands smelled like fried dough and cinnamon. My older sister showed me how to bite off the ends of a Twizzler to make a straw; we invented our own brand of “Strawberry Coke.”
Grandpa Charlie fostered my passion for the game at every level. He wasn’t really a soccer fan, but somehow he knew what soccer could mean to me.
When my father returned from Bosnia it was late November, I was in second grade, and I was registered in the local recreation league. That spring, I honed my skills with Coach Larry’s mantra of “speed and control” ringing in my ears during dribbling drills. I also learned about positioning; I stopped running around the pitch like a dog off leash.
I remember the first goal I ever scored. Somehow I managed to volley the ball to myself, lob it over a defender standing right in front of me, and drop the ball under the crossbar and over the keeper.
Pure jubilation.
My first goal taught me that sometimes you need to be lucky.
My second goal didn’t come until the last game of the next season: a rebound shot that I managed to strike through a crowded penalty area.
My second goal taught me that you can never give up.
i moved up to fifth-grade travel soccer about the same time David Beckham arrived in Major League Soccer. I became a fan of American soccer; my team of choice: the Chicago Fire.
In 2007, all I wanted was to go to Chicago to watch the Fire play. My parents agreed to take me if I researched the history of both teams playing in our intended match. Which I gladly did—while researching all of the other teams in the process. The first game I attended with my father was the debut match for Mexican legend Cuauhtémoc Blanco for the Fire, who scored the equalizer in a 1–1 affair.
I was growing in the game, but I wanted to be better. My team practiced Mondays and Wednesdays with an optional Friday session, where I was often the only player. On Saturdays I would walk to the park near our house and spend hours dribbling around the cones I set up there.
At home, the garage door became my target for free kicks until my father came out and asked what all the banging was.
All that practice was paying off. When I was 14, Coach Kyle taught a possession style that played into my strengths, an approach similar to Manchester United, the team with the devil on its badge. So I became a “Red Devil” myself.
I also got my first job: a soccer official.
my transition to adams High School was chaotic, but soccer remained a constant.
Then tragedy struck. After the end of my freshman year, my teammate Cody Poczik got his driver’s license. He died in a car accident within a week.
Cody was a center midfielder with a brilliant first touch and a spectacular shooting ability. He almost always wore a Manchester United or a Bayern Munich shirt and white and red Adidas boots. Whenever he made a joke at practice, we’d all crack up. Like so many of my teammates, he was like a brother to me.
My dad and I went to Cody’s funeral along with three teammates. We watched as Cody’s father laid the yellow-gold #5 jersey over his son’s coffin. Folded over his other arm was Cody’s warm-up jacket. He looked over his right shoulder to see the four of us among the mourners, his expression torn between appreciation for our being there and untold amounts of grief for his son. He gave the jacket a wave in our direction before it joined the other garment on the casket.
during the travel season of my sophomore year, I played for Matt Larson, the last real coach I ever had. I became Matt’s “Swiss Army Knife,” the player he felt he could position anywhere on the pitch to get the job done.
But the most important lesson Matt taught me was not about soccer, but about myself. He realized I learned quickly, but that I had a tendency to overthink decisions on the pitch. He taught me to not fear making mistakes, that sometimes I had to “go with my gut.”
By the end of my senior year I would have to make just that sort of decision. My last game ended in a 1-0 defeat against a Riley team that was afraid of the chances I created. But two of our midfielders ran into each other in the center of the pitch and Riley scored on a rolling shot from 30 yards out.
It was one of the few times I ever cried after a soccer match. Part of me knew that my competitive career was over.
soccer has different names throughout the world. The English call it football, the Italians call it calcio, the Australians often call it footy. But those most passionate about the sport call it the Beautiful Game.
The Beautiful Game.
That was the driving factor in my decision to end my competitive soccer career— soccer was no longer the game I went to with my grandfather. It was a job, a burden, and an affliction. The Beautiful Game had lost its luster.
Soccer had been the constant in my life—it was my escape, my friend, and in an unexplainable way, soccer taught me what love is and how to love; yet I was leaving it all behind.
At least that was what I thought.
About a week after classes started at Wabash my freshman year, a campus-wide email went out. “Soccer at 8 in the Fieldhouse!” it proclaimed.
So I thought, Why not?
I put on my running shoes and played a full 90 minutes. It was fun and fast-paced; it didn’t punish players for making mistakes.
I loved it.
There are competitive moments, sure, but as I wind down my soccer career on a gym floor—the same surface on which it began— the only thing that matters to me is that soccer is not only a game for me again, but it is Beautiful.