The DUSC U17W team is playing the semifinals of the state cup this Saturday at 6 pm at Pier 40. They are going to play against Eastern FC. Coach Alex Cuba has a message for all of us:

“Good morning - First of all, i would like to say that it has certainly been a challenging year for us. Things have certainly not worked out exactly as we planned when we started the year. However, we still have one of our team goals still in site and that is repeating at the NY State Cup champs!! I hope that you all can make it out this Saturday at 6 pm @ Pier 40 to cheer on your boys and their brothers. I can assure you we plan on putting on a great exhibition of talent, desire and grit. Our game is beginning to come around and I see nothing but success from here on.”

Coach Alex Cuba

During the last week of March, all 18 boys on the Downtown United Soccer Club U14 (White) team took an early Saturday morning flight to Dallas with their coach and some parents to play in a weeklong, “invitation only” soccer tournament called the “Dr. Pepper Dallas Cup.” This year’s Dallas Cup, the 34th since the tournament was launched in 1980, brought together 180 teams ranging in age from U13-U19 and representing 33 countries. There was a lot of very good soccer—but the trip ended up involving a lot more than soccer.  What follows is a brief account by two of the parents (hereafter “Arthur and I”) of what the boys did and saw.

The Dallas-Fort Worth Airport is larger than Manhattan. The first challenge we faced was finding our way out of this Texas-sized terminus and onto the LBJ freeway. Thanks to our intrepid van drivers, Sergio (Pablo’s dad and team manager) and Jhon (Jean Paul’s dad), who performed heroically throughout the trip, we soon found ourselves at our hotel, surrounded by a lot of players and coaches.  After we checked in, the next major task was to navigate the road construction and convoluted traffic patterns of downtown Dallas to get the boys to the Cotton Bowl in time for the opening ceremony. The pageantry, with all 180 teams parading onto the field, was pretty impressive—and even a little overwhelming at first. But things worked out okay. While sitting high up in the stadium and trying to find our boys, we spotted Sergio, whose black garb, worn especially for the occasion, made him stand out in the sea of bright-colored uniforms. Besides helping us locate the boys, Sergio was remarkably effective in getting them to kneel in formation and submit to being photographed. This was the first of his (and his wife Lisa’s) many successes in holding down the forces of chaos that always seemed ready to disrupt the fragile order of our trip.

After we got the boys out of the stadium with minimal damage (a bit of frostbite—the weather proved a good deal colder than the 70 degrees we had been led to expect—and some gorging on fried dough), we found our way to the first of the series of restaurants that, thanks to Arthur’s foresight and planning, proved to be one of the main (non-soccer) sources of satisfaction provided by the trip. This first one was Italian, not bad for Dallas, and well above Arthur’s managed-down expectations. It was followed the next night by our only unscripted evening meal of the week, which took place near closing hours (on a Sunday) at a gritty-looking Mexican restaurant in one of the city’s many deserted-looking shopping malls. There we were treated to very good food, great margaritas (inspected for quality by coach Alan before other parent volunteers were allowed to step in), and the wonderful hospitality for which Texans are justly famous. The place had been discovered by Lisa while on one of her and Sergio’s daily morning trips to the neighborhood Target to get supplies and sandwich-makings for the boys’ lunches.

The next in our round of feasts, in honor of the parents of four of our players, took place in a Colombian bistro called “Casa Vieja” (or “Old House”). There most of us (though not Arthur, who is a vegetarian) were presented with an amazing array of beef pork chicken sausage diluted with plantains and rice—and where both food and surroundings were inviting enough that half our company returned a couple nights later to watch the Colombia national team play the Venezuelans (and where we had the unexpected treat of running into the DUSC U-17 team, who were also playing in the tournament). But of no doubt greater satisfaction to the boys were our several excursions to Texas barbecue, TexMex, and burger joints that were almost all well above average.

Great barbecue and hospitality are, of course, standard fare for Texas; it’s what we expected (or at least hoped for) and we were not disappointed. But in the category of the less expected and even exotic, there was our Wednesday night buffet at a Persian restaurant—featuring all kinds of kabobs and a tasty stew called eggplant khoresht—that gave Arthur the chance to pay homage to his Iranian heritage, and that ended with his farewell conversation (in a modern version of Parsi) with the lady owner. Even stranger in some ways, though, was the Monday late afternoon Passover seder that was set up by Abby (Arthur’s wife) in a Hilton bar one escalator ride down from the lobby, and attended by nearly equal numbers in our party of Catholics (though Sergio professes to be an atheist) and Jews. At the end, our party included a stranger waving a red yarmulke who called down from the lobby to ask if he could join us. (The guy, who looked fit enough and ready to vault over the escalator rail, turned out to be not only a Brigadier General in the Israeli army, but the dad of a 17-year old who flew over from Israel to play for his old New Jersey travel team.)

But enough about food. What about soccer and the boys?  Well, in what felt like freezing weather, and with the wind blowing mightily off the Texas plain (for the first four days of the tournament), the boys tied a pretty respectable, and imposing-looking, team from Mexico—so imposing that, as we were watching them warm up, we wondered if our boys would be able to stay with them at all. In what was the windiest game we’ve ever seen, the boys were winning 2-0 at the half (with the wind at their backs)—and they held that lead until the last ten minutes, when the game turned into a wind-blown scrum in front of our goal. In the first half of our second game, the boys managed (again with help from the wind) to hold to a 1-1 tie the Pateadores from Southern California (think of all that sunshine and those playing fields, and then how our Pier 40 looked back in November), the team that ended up winning the entire (32-team) U-14 division. As in the first game, things in this second game went downhill after the first half. But after a somewhat disappointing game against Chicago Fire, a nationally ranked Academy Team (though, again, we were down only one goal after the first half, this time played with the wind in our faces—and without Kevin), the boys won their last two “friendlies,” one a close match against a team from San Diego and the other a 3-0 shutout of a team from London. The outcome of the last of these games ensured that Alan would join the boys in what turned out to be part of their rite of passage: daily immersions in the frigid pool back at the Hilton—in some cases, right after their pre-dawn warm-up runs around the “lake.” Though maybe not standard “warm-down” procedure (at least it wasn’t in our day), it was a memorable way of celebrating what the boys and their coach accomplished on the trip.

Soccer, as we’ve all come to realize, is a contact sport—one that produces its share of injuries (though Arthur and I, even after watching a good number of youth soccer games, never cease to be amazed by the resilience of the boys after taking some pretty serious-looking hits). We had our share of injuries on this trip, and two of them resulted in visits to emergency rooms. The first one happened during our third game, a collision of kneecaps between our striker Taka and one of the Chicago defenders that was heard on the sideline.  With some guidance from the Dallas wing of the Baylor University medical system (reportedly one of the best in the country), Arthur managed to get Taka to the office of an orthopedic surgeon—a star college football player some 40 years ago, it turns out—who, after diagnosing a minor fracture, helped see to it that Taka was up on crutches the next day (and playing the following week). In the second case, in an unscheduled game (of American football this time) on the day we were flying home, Kevin dislocated a finger.  During our trip to the ER, Kevin was given a heavy enough dose of morphine to get him through the pain of pulling the joint back in place. And when we brought him back to join the rest of the boys at the restaurant, they were lined up outside waiting to carry him in for the last of our many great meals before heading for the airport and home.

All in all, then—and despite the losses and the injuries—the Dallas trip was a great experience for the boys. They learned what it was like to play, and hold their own, against some really good teams. They got to watch and hang out in the lobby with 18-year olds from places like Fulham and Manchester, and Tokyo and Rio. And they got the chance to spend a lot of time with each other, off the field and on, in relaxed moments as well as tense and competitive ones.  So, the next time the boys happen to be watching, say, a Cowboys game—or, better yet, a game in the Cotton Bowl—most of them will think to themselves: “We had a pretty good time in Dallas, didn’t’ we?” That’s what Arthur and I will be thinking.

Written By Arthur Eshaghpour and Don Chew

Once again, we are proud to announce DUSC players that have been selected by the United Stated Soccer Federation to participate in the U.S. Soccer Training Center in Brooklyn, NY.

Jack Valderrabano, Kevin Heras, Pablo Napoli Borrero and Harris Nadelman were invited on March 12-13 to train at Drier Offerman Park in Brooklyn.