Southeast Soccer Club brings the world’s game to area youth

By JAN WILLMS

For nearly 35 years, the Southeast Soccer Club has been serving families as a competitive traveling soccer club that is community-based, family-oriented and affordable. Although it has grown over the years from its roots in southeast Minneapolis, its volunteer and family-based support has not changed.

“The club started because of Wilford Schulz,” said Jim Drake, who soon joined Schulz back in 1981 in getting the soccer club going. “He was passionate, and the driving force behind it. He was a very demanding coach, but if you could play for him you would learn a lot about soccer.”

“I got into it because my son and one of his friends were good players, and Wilford recruited them,” Drake added. “We ran the organization for many years and used a lot of volunteers.”

Drake said the club continued for a long time on Wilford’s determination and effort.

“Anyone who wanted to play, could,” Drake continued. “We had a lot of good players, and some not-so-good, but if they worked hard and could put up with Wilford and me, they could play. We didn’t cut anybody. And some of them developed into very good players.”

Drake said that in the early days, they had four to five teams or fewer, depending on the number of players.

“We kept the costs low, and we had a lot of parents help coach,” he said. “We had fundraisers for kids who couldn’t afford some of the expenses.”

In the beginning, the Minnesota Youth Soccer Association (MYSA) was not in existence. Today, Southeast Soccer is affiliated with MYSA and competes throughout the Twin Cities and beyond. The club fields boys and girls teams from ages 8 through 18 on all experience levels.

There is a skill-building program called Lil’ Dribblers that is open to children from 3 to 8 years old who like to kick a ball around and may be just learning about the game of soccer.

Parents are drawn to the soccer club, and they remain a part of it through years to come.

Claudia Motl, the club coordinator, started with the organization when her oldest son was 10; he is now 21. She has had three boys go through the program, with one still participating.

“My husband is from Came-roon,” she said, “where soccer is the main sport. “So it was a natural for their sons to become a part of Southeast Soccer Club. Motl first served as a secretary on the board of the club, and in her current position does all the registrations with MYSA and works with each team and organizes all the groups.

“The club creates a wonderful opportunity for parents to get to know each other,” she said. Motl said the board feels it is important for the teams to have autonomy and make their own decisions. Whether to have a volunteer parent coach or hire a coach is determined by each individual team, with the families making that decision.

“I feel soccer will continue to grow as people realize what a good sport it is,” Motl added. “There’s a lot of running and exercise and teamwork, and so many more kids get to play at one time than in basketball, for example. And there are not as many injuries and it’s not as expensive as some other sports.”

Another parent, who is serving the Southeast Soccer Club in a second stint coaching a girls’ team, is Frank Clancy, whose 23-year-old daughter first started with the group when she was eight. Today his 10-year-old son is playing.

“My daughter played soccer up in Northeast Minneapolis in Northeast Park one summer when she was seven years old,” Clancy recalled. He said that at the end of that summer she said, “Dad, I really want to play with the same girls and have the same teammates.”

“So I searched and found the Southeast Soccer Club,” Clancy said. “She began playing with one of the early coaches, Tom Johnson. And they needed a volunteer coach, so I coached a girls’ team for six years.”

“I would like a coach who embodies what I like in sports,” Clancy said, explaining why he decided to participate. “I’ve played sports my entire life and for girls, in particular, sports are a crucial way for them to develop a sense of physical strength and mastery. In college, my female friends who played sports had a confidence in moving through the world that I really liked.”

Through Southeast Soccer Club, Clancy’s daughter Molly was able to play from 8-18 with the same group of girls, and he said they developed friendships that have endured.

“Molly developed a willingness to work hard, and if knocked down, literally as well as figuratively, she got back up. We played one season when she was about 10, and she’s tiny. She played against some boys, and it was very competitive. We got beat up a little bit, and she got knocked down a lot. A referee came up to me afterwards and said she was the toughest kid her size he had ever seen. That’s what kids learn when they play sports the right way. That is the essence of Southeast Soccer, and I think a lot of parents could tell a similar story.”

Clancy said there is no question that soccer is growing steadily, if not rapidly. He said teams across the United States are drawing fans, and many of those fans grew up playing soccer as kids.

Clancy said his daughter was just starting to play when Mia Hamm and the U.S. team won the World Cup.

“If you think about it, she’s in the first generation of young women to grow up playing the game and with this incredible set of role models on the world stage.”

Soccer is the world’s game, according to Clancy. He said the growth of the sport is a sign of the United States and Minneapolis becoming more cosmopolitan. “I think it’s great for Minneapolis and St. Paul to embrace soccer,” he said.

Like music, Clancy said he sees soccer as a means for uniting and keeping people together, no matter what culture they are from. “I’m not a musician, but to play music well you have to work hard and have a lot of discipline,” he noted. “To play soccer well, you also have to work hard and be disciplined. If you never play beyond high school or go national, you still have to develop that ability to learn and focus, as well as the ability to work with other people. It’s the ultimate team game.”

And it has taken a team of people over the years to develop the Southeast Soccer Club. Besides Schulz and Drake, Michael Sampson was a long-time coach and president of the club. Tom Eckhardt also served in those capacities and pushed for starting girls’ teams. Kent Fritz-Smead, another coach, reached out to Ethiopian and Somali youth. Tom Johnson coached, and his son Tamba was one of the first players.

It takes a team….

Founder of Soccer Club started first team with a little bribery and a lot of work

By JAN WILLMS

Wilford Schulz, the driving force behind the creation of the Southeast Soccer Club, does not play soccer anymore. But he still has the build of an athlete. And he still is very much into the game.

Soft-spoken, with his slight accent identifying his German heritage, he recalls how he first started coaching soccer.

“I had been coaching baseball for a few seasons,” he noted. “All of a sudden I found out there was a soccer league, so I sniffed it out. There was a program at Luxton Park. And the fellow in charge said the season was about to start.”

Schulz said that forced him to be a bit aggressive in getting organized.

“I told my baseball players that we were going to play soccer, and they told me that I wasn’t quite right,” he recalled.

“I told them that unless they were at the park at 10am Saturday morning, they would not be playing baseball the next year. And, they all showed up.”

Schulz said that at first the teams were not very good. The players knew that soccer meant kicking a ball, but they didn’t kick it very well.

But as time went on, kids recruited more kids and the number of teams grew.

“When we first joined the Minnesota Youth Soccer League, the team that I brought was by no means a good team,” Schulz said. “But we started to play better and faster teams, teams that knew what to do with a ball. And once that started, we started to improve also.”

Schulz admitted he was a tough coach, but he said he knew that discipline was important.

“I wanted the players to improve, and I wanted them to start paying attention,” he said. “Soccer is a little more difficult. The picture on the field changes all the time. Players should be responding to the ball, and I expected certain things. I even gave them homework, asking them questions to answer.”

He said he asked the team to identify the dimensions of a penalty area, and asked them how early they should come to practice and how they could tone down a game if it started getting too rough.

“Pretty soon everything fell into place,” Schulz continued. “I gave up coaching baseball and basketball and focused on soccer.”

He said he and Jim Drake started the Southeast Soccer Club, and then got Tom Johnson to also coach. “The three of us pretty much ran it for a whole bunch of years.”

Schulz did not grow up playing soccer as a child. He remembers seeing the game for the first time when he was out for a walk with his mother in Breslau, Germany. “There was a fence along the street, and down below adults were playing soccer,” he said. “I remember one thing, and maybe that’s where I developed my interest in soccer. My mother told me it was a game for poor people. I don’t think you could get by with saying that today.”

Arriving in this country at 22, Schulz still remembered seeing that first game on the streets of Germany. He earned a degree in journalism and worked for many years as a community school

coordinator, one time helping students build a race car and then go out and race it. But soccer was never far from his mind, and he coached from around 1980 until 2011.

He remembers his days with the Southeast Soccer Club with pleasure.

“Once a year we had a soccer and sports banquet, a dinner with a speaker,” he said. He also started a Halloween Soccer Bowl for teams of 9 and 10-year-olds.

“One time we had up to 60 teams playing in the Bowl, six games going on side-by-side,” he recalled. “It would happen around Halloween, and winter was knocking at the door. One weekend was cold, windy and raining. Everybody was getting soaked; the parents, the referees and me. The fields were mud, and I was amazed the kids didn’t get pneumonia or something. But they thought it was the most fun thing they ever did.”

Schulz said soccer brought parents together, and they got to know each other. Kids would often go to the same school and play soccer together and become friends. He said he misses those days of soccer, and he is tempted to coach again.

He said that as a coach, he knew what he wanted his team to do, and he didn’t always get along with some of the newer coaches. He wrote a newsletter, Field Notes, and he said what he thought about the importance of practice and being on time and being disciplined. “The newsletter caused a lot of problems,” he joked.

He said he tried to set up meetings for coaches, and not that many wanted to attend. He tried to get on the new board, but didn’t make it. “I realized I was no longer a desired person,” he said.

But soccer remains his passion. Right now he is going through several boxes of photographs from over the years, sorting out pictures to put in several albums. He still goes back to Powderhorn Park for an ice cream social every year, and said he is amazed at how many of the kids he coached are still around. “Some of them are grandpas now, which makes it very difficult to recognize them,” he smiled.

“Soccer is a thinking man’s game,” Schulz stated. “And it forms strong bonds. I remember one summer I had a team with 14 kids playing, and each one of them was from a different country. And I was from Germany, the 15th country. I really felt good about it.”

“Maybe I exaggerate a little when I say this, but soccer has got to be the most popular game in the world,” Schulz said. “Countries from all over play it. And it’s definitely growing here in the United States.”