"So," he concludes, "I would want to wait until the child is thirteen or fourteen to tell a parent, 'You got a real good chance.'"
The upshot of all this -- the rec leagues, the School of Excellence, the constant scouting -- is that by the time a kid arrives at the Rush tryouts, the club's coaching staff is already familiar with the player. "We know exactly what we're looking for," Hoxhaa says.
John Johnston
Anthony Camera
Youngsters -- and their parents -- listen to a Rush coach during tryouts recently.
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"Basically, we use our tryouts to look at kids outside the club that we might have missed, and that could put us over the top," Dengerink adds.
Still, Hoxhaa and his colleagues proceed with tact and caution. They know they're competing against other teams, which employ their own youth scouts. Many ten-year-olds attending these Rush tryouts are also auditioning with other clubs.
"We've already got our top U-11 team picked out in our minds," Kummer acknowledges. "But we've got to be careful to pay attention to them, or they'll go to CGSA" -- the Colorado Girls' Soccer Academy.
The little girls are divided into three groups. Although no one says so explicitly, it becomes apparent that the girls on the easternmost field are the best; those in the middle are not quite as good but have some skills; the kids to the west are the least skilled. Each group splits into teams and begins to play under the watchful eye of the Rush coaches, who take careful notes on clipboards.
The parents assemble along the sidelines closest to where their children are playing. A few shout instructions. "Get down on the ball," screams one red-faced man. "Oh, come on," another mutters under his breath. "Pay attention." A third tells his daughter, "Pull up your sock -- look like a player."
Snippets of conversations hint at suspected intrigue and terrible injustice. Influence peddling and politicking are assumed. "Well, she was going along just fine, and then she started playing in these 3 v. 3 tournaments and her skills just started dropping," one woman growls into a cell phone. "Her playing time started falling off..."
Coaches are a constant topic of conversation: their skills, their incompetence, their abysmal judgment, their dictatorial behavior, their relative positioning in the organization, their general worth as human beings.
Privately, the coaches gripe, too. They say they can explain how it's better for a child to be on a team with players at her own level than on the best team until they lose their breath -- but some mothers and fathers cannot see beyond the glory and promise that Rush's top teams, Nike and Swoosh, represent.
"It was a tough experience when the coach called and said, 'We're moving down another kid and we can only keep one goalie -- so you have to move down,'" says one father, explaining why he and his twelve-year-old son had to leave the Rush. "We approached a number of other clubs. We ended up going to Littleton. They took him sight unseen."
The more-serious parents are easy to identify: They say "we" and "our" when they begin to talk about their child's soccer career. "This is our third club," starts one man. "We started out at the Rush, then went to Storm, then to the Colorado Girls' Soccer Academy, and now we're back at the Rush again." Incompetent coaching and inadequate playing time, it seems, are the major reasons for a ten-year-old being so well-traveled. But soon she'll get a break: "We usually take about three weeks off from soccer every July," her father says.
On the third day of tryouts, the demarcations between beginning players, decent players and future stars is clearer. So, too, are the distinctions between parents. By now, most mothers and fathers along the westernmost field have accepted that their girls are not going to be stars this year.
Parents along the eastern fields are satisfied, pleased, terribly vindicated: This is where their girl belongs. "At the top level, they get more attention from the best coaches," explains one father who has driven from Aurora. "So you want that. Besides, this will teach her to be competitive, and that's what she needs in the world and the marketplace."
These parents all make an effort to tell each other that they are merely along for the ride: "It's whatever makes her happy," they'll say. "It doesn't matter to me."
But it obviously matters to the parents watching the middle field. "Damn!" exhales one beefy man watching his daughter. "You gotta move." He sighs, then says, "She'll never make it."
"It looks to me like they've already weeded them out," huffs another middle-field woman.
"I'm befuddled, frankly," adds another. "It's clear what they're doing, but my daughter was there yesterday" -- she nods toward the top field-- "and now she's here. I don't get it. I mean, if you look at some of these girls, they're not as good as she is."
As the three-day U-11 tryout marathon winds down, Kirtley has mixed emotions. On the one hand, he's elated: Nodding toward the field where the Rush's newest elite Nike and Swoosh teams are running back and forth, he proclaims the audition a huge success. Once again, the club has managed to nab not just the top talent in the Rush's geographical boundaries, but also in the region.
