Mission

Soccer
by Jordan Conn

For the varsity soccer players at one San Francisco

school, their team is their family, and futbol might be
their only ticket to college.

from the Good Men Project Magazine www.GoodMenProject.com

For the varsity soccer players at one San Francisco school, their team
is their family, and futbol might be their only ticket to college. Jordan
Conn shadowed the team last fall, as they defended their title against a
neighborhood rival.

The guy on the trophy looks white.

This much has been decided as the Mission High School soccer players pass around the statuette
they’ve owned for four years running, the foot-tall piece of wood lined with bronze that repre-
sents their status as the best soccer team in the city.

The figure who sits atop the trophy, the one the players rub with reverence, the one whose com-
pany is coveted by all of the city’s coaches—well, he doesn’t look a damn thing like his current
owners. His hair is parted perfectly to the side, too long to match Jose Guevara’s close-cropped
spike and too neat to resemble Diego Tamayo’s faux-hawk. His jersey looks like it belongs on an
Ivy League rugby player, with its plunging neckline and its collar folded down.
And the shorts?

“Those things are hella short,” says Jose Mendoza, laughing as he points. “You can’t be wearing
those around here.”

Welcome to the Mission District, one of San Francisco’s most dynamic, constantly-buzzing neigh-
borhoods. It’s a place where twenty-something hipsters from Williamsburg live next to sixty-
something abuelas from Oaxaca, where residents range from lawyers to activists to artists to
gang-bangers.

***

It’s a neighborhood that has drawn wide attention for its irrepressible culture (at once Pan-
American and unmistakably San Franciscan), its progressive politics, and its semi-regular streaks
of violent crime. It’s also the home of the two best high school soccer teams in the city, the Mis-
sion Bears and the O’Connell Boilermakers, both set to compete for the city’s championship on
an overcast fall day.

They won’t be playing in the Mission—there is no field here worthy of hosting such an event—
but before the Bears take the J train to Balboa Park’s Boxer Stadium, they sit in the bowels of
Mission High School, and they admire their hardware.

Mario Ruiz leans over to examine the trophy. Listed on the official roster as 5-foot-3 and 89
pounds, Ruiz looks more like he’s preparing for a sixth-grade gym class than a varsity soccer
game. His Mission warm-up jacket—deep brown with gold trim, the team’s logo on its breast—
swallows up his small frame. His gold jersey and matching shorts look like a costume, the get-up
of a kid going as a soccer player for Halloween.

But whether or not Mission wins today, or he gets into the game, it’s clear to the freshman
midfielder that he’s already part of a San Francisco dynasty. “Mission, Mission, Mission, Balboa,
Mission, Mission,” he calls out to his teammates, reading the names etched on the trophy as city
champions during the 1970s.

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He giggles and bounces ecstatically on his feet. In all, he discovers, the Bears have won thirty-two
championships in the city league’s 73-year history. No other school has more than ten.

***

Mission won its first city championship in 1939, and at that time, the white guy on top of the tro-
phy would have fit right in.

The neighborhood was mostly composed of recent Irish and Italian immigrants in the first half of
the 20th century, but many Mission residents left in the 1950s after the G.I. bill gave World War
II veterans an opportunity to move away from low-income areas. “White flight left a void that
people of color could fill,” says longtime Mission-based community organizer Eric Quezada, point-
ing to the influx of Mexican immigrants who moved into the neighborhood.

That community grew over the next several decades, and as turmoil gripped much of Central and
South America, new nationalities began popping up in the Mission. In recent years, young whites
have flooded the western part of the neighborhood (the area closest to Mission High School),
giving the neighborhood a distinct duality. On one block, you’ll walk past vegan restaurants and
coffee shops, on the next, you enter a world of taquerias and tabernas.

The Mission’s streets are lined on one side with murals that boast of the Latino community’s long
history of political activism and on the other side with boutique shops that mark the district’s sta-
tus as one of America’s hippest neighborhoods. But the Bears roster reflects the fact that, despite
the Mission’s demographic dynamism, this is still an immigrant-dominated community.

Nearly all of the players on the team were born either outside the U.S. or are the children of par-
ents born outside the U.S. About half the team is of Mexican heritage, and many others are Guate-
malan or Salvadoran. There are no Anglos on the squad. Except the coach.

***

Scott Kennedy sits in silence on his folded-out lawn chair, watching the ritual he designed play out
before his eyes. In parallel lines, Kennedy’s players jog back and forth across the field, varying form
and pace to prepare their muscles for the match. He’s nervous.

The jitters that began today, when he awoke in his suburban Marin County home, are reaching
a crescendo. It’s minutes before kickoff. They will win, he believes. They will win and it won’t be
close. Five to one, maybe. Three goals for Jose Mendoza, the senior striker who hasn’t fully
realized his potential—at least not until this, the final game of his high school career. Maybe a
headed-in score for Diego Tamayo, the junior midfielder with the body of a linebacker and the
temper of a street-brawler. And several spectacular saves from Jose Guevara, of course.

Guevara is the best goalkeeper in the city, a junior who has started since he was a freshman, the
kid with the talent to play D-1 ball, the brain to aim for Stanford or Berkeley, and the leadership
skills to become only the second non-senior Kennedy has ever named captain.

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“There’s a lot of
luck involved,”
says Kennedy.
“We just haven’t
had any of it. I
keep thinking
that’s finally
going to change
with this game.”

A win today would be a thrilling end to a frustrating season. The Bears have lost two out of their
15 games. For most teams, a banner year. For Mission, a disappointment. “There’s a lot of luck
involved,” says Kennedy. “We just haven’t had any of it. I keep thinking that’s finally going to
change with this game.”

When you play at an inner-city school like Mission—where players are tempted by the allure
of the neighborhood’s dominant norteño and sureño gangs, where some of the boys have no
mothers and even more have no fathers, where instability in the home can lead to inconsistency
on the field—sometimes, you need all the luck you can get.

Often, off-field issues ransack Mission’s roster before it’s even been formed. “There’s a lot of
talented kids in this school who aren’t even on our team,” says Kennedy. Many would-be players
fall short of the 2.0 grade point average required to participate in varsity sports (among Bears
players, the average GPA is 3.23).

On the team, instability is a constant. Junior twin brothers Isai and Josue Rosales are still
acclimating to life in the U.S. after immigrating last year from Guatemala. Jose Mendoza has
floated back and forth between San Francisco and Mexico, readjusting to new friends and a
new culture each time.

Diego Tamayo was four when his father died in a car accident. Even goalkeeper Jose Guevara,
whose family is more stable than most of the Bears’, has had to be a caretaker to his younger
siblings, with his mother working at a taqueria and his father at a bakery, logging as many hours
as they can.

Kennedy, 42, looks like the kind of inner-city coach invented on a Hollywood scriptwriter’s
laptop—a snarling, barking, cackling, foulmouthed hard-ass who is big on discipline and short
on patience. In the machismo-fueled Mission District, Kennedy may be the high school’s biggest
tough guy, his 5-foot-6 frame supporting the body of a grizzly bear.

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On a team whose players get coach-mandated haircuts, Kennedy’s ‘do is the shortest of them all—
perhaps a legacy of his seven years in the Marines. After service, Kennedy studied criminal justice
and psychology at San Francisco State, then took a job at Mission fourteen years ago as a commu-
nity liaison, working to cut down truancy and criminal behavior among students.
He took over as coach of both the boys and girls soccer teams two years after that, and became
athletic director a year after he started coaching. His teams have regularly made the playoffs
throughout his tenure and since 2005, as the trophy attests, the Bears haven’t lost their grip on
the city championship.

***

Despite the school’s reputation as one of the toughest in the city, Kennedy loves coaching at Mis-
sion. “In the suburbs, they have spoiled brats,” he says. “Here, there are no spoiled brats. You
don’t have to deal with Mommy and Daddy.” That’s an understatement at Mission, and Kennedy
recognizes that, to a degree, the team fills the gap. “We have to be a complete and total family,
from the very best senior on the team to the very worst freshman,” he says. “That’s not so much
of a necessity at a lot of schools. It’s a necessity here.”

It’s a family governed by rules—“stupid rules,” Kennedy calls them, but rules that must be fol-
lowed if you want to don the Bears’ brown and gold. First, cut your hair. Second, shave. It’s about
presentation, about being a “gentleman,” about exhibiting professionalism even when you’re an
amateur.

Freshmen and sophomores do the dirty work—carrying the water bottles, gathering the soccer
balls, preparing the field before practice, and, afterward, making sure it’s left just the way they
found it. Don’t miss practice. If you miss practice, you run. (Although, if you come to practice you
also run, so either way, get in shape.) Look someone in the eye when they talk to you—coach, ref-
eree, teacher, teammate, whoever. And if you lose—God forbid you should ever lose—then don’t
drop your head. Keep it high. Shake your opponent’s hand. Congratulate him. Next time, wipe the
floor with his ass.

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“It’s all a matter of teaching kids the discipline and responsibility that they don’t get at home,” he
says. “It’s a matter of teaching them that here. That’s life. It’s not just a stupid game.”

In this family, Kennedy rules as the patriarch, equal parts loving father and unchallenged tyrant. He’s
an unbridled screamer and an unashamed fountain of profanity, often calling players out for their
inattentiveness or lack of discipline, sometimes embarrassing them in front of their peers.
“I want to push every last button that I can possibly push,” Kennedy says. “Because if you can deal
with me, then when you get a teacher or a boss or whoever that’s really getting on you they’ll be a
piece of cake. I also push to see who’s strong mentally. Because if you can deal with me every single
day in practices, and you can still get through it, then I know I can invest in you and rely on you in
crunch time.”

For some players, the coach’s abrasive style and stringent rules are too much. Kennedy doesn’t cut
players, but he counts on several guys quitting in the early part of each season. Others thrive un-
der Kennedy. “He’s made me into the person I am today,” says Guevara. “People don’t understand;
when you’re under his wing, you’re going to go places. He might be tough, but he’s tough for a
reason.”

The players can also find a role model in Wilson Jimenez, the college student in his third year as an
assistant coach. Jimenez started for four years under Kennedy, winning Midfielder of the Year hon-
ors and leading the Bears to an undefeated season as a senior.

Like Kennedy, Wilson is short, tough (“Nails,” Kennedy calls him), and sports a skull-hugging buzz
cut. He and his mentor operate on the same wavelength, strategizing silently during games, aware
that they’re thinking the exact same thoughts. Only Wilson thinks in Spanish. And when a quick
adjustment is needed, that’s the team’s language of choice.

Minutes before kickoff, Kennedy’s pre-game speech needs no translation. “Play our game,” he says.
“Talk to each other. Communicate. If we do that, I believe we’ll be fine.” There is only so much that
can be said before a game of this magnitude, and most of it, the players already know. They’ve been
here before. They know the joy that waits if they win. So instead, Kennedy reminds them of what
happens if they lose.

“At the end of the day,” he says, “somebody’s going to be crying.”

The players nod.
“Don’t let it be you.”

Some years, the championship game is a proxy for a class war. But not today. Both Mission and
O’Connell are based in the Mission District (although O’Connell coach Bob Gamino contends that
Mission’s campus is one block outside the neighborhood’s borders).

Both schools are largely Latino; Mission is 45 percent Hispanic, and O’Connell 74 percent. Fewer
than 4 percent of eleventh graders in either school are at or above proficiency in math, compared to
the city-wide average of 25 percent. Mission is larger, with 859 students to O’Connell’s 666.
Dropout rates at these institutions are among the highest in the city, and both schools struggle with
gang activity, teen pregnancies, and the reality that scores of students have little interest in their
own education.

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As the game kicks off, the stadium’s noise builds, ringing from end to end with a spanglish chorus
of chants and cheers. Behind both teams’ benches, girls scream players’ names before chanting
“Vamos!” or “We love you!” Teachers huddle together, bragging about which Bears or
Boilermakers are currently enrolled in their class.

O’Connell dominates possession at the outset. Minutes in, an O’Connell striker shoots from seven
yards away, and it sails out of bounds. Minutes later, the same striker passes to a fast-charging
teammate, who heads the ball directly into Mission goalkeeper Jose Guevara’s arms.

Two shots. No goals. But for Mission, this is the way these games are lost. You allow your
opponents to keep shooting, keep attacking, keep going after your defenders, and eventually, the
pressure builds until you break. No defender can be perfect on every possession. And when a
defender makes a big enough mistake, there is little a goalkeeper can do to save him.

After Mission loses possession, the Bears are called for a foul at midfield. O’Connell takes its free
kick, lofting the ball high into the air until it drops toward a huddled mass of players from both
teams.

The ball hits O’Connell’s Emmanuel Caldera in the chest, his back facing the goal. He lets it fall to
the ground, stepping it to assert his control. Standing in goal, Guevara can’t see the ball, his vision
blocked by players from both teams. Caldera turns. He shoots.

Guevara dives. But he has no chance.

1-0, O’Connell.

Jose Guevara knew this would happen. He knew O’Connell was too good, its strikers too deadly,
its team too talented to let Mission relax. Guevara knew they would create chances, and he knew
they would get shots, and he knew that, even as good as he is, he probably couldn’t stop them all.

Guevara also knows that he’s one of the lucky ones. He didn’t always see it, not with his parents’
jobs so often keeping them away from home, not with money so tight that he was afraid to leave
the house, lest he slip up and drop a few bucks on a movie or some food.

He knows that he’s lucky because he speaks of parents in the plural, and when he talks about
Mom and Dad, he’s not referring to some faraway characters in Mexico or Guatemala. And he
knows that because he’s rare, because he has the guidance that those around him lack, he also
has the responsibility to take charge and lead others, to pass on the simple life lessons that broken
homes rarely teach.

“When you look around the team you realize, wow, a lot of kids on the team don’t have dads or
don’t have moms,” Guevara says. “So they need this team to be a family. We all need this team to
be a family.”

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Guevara is used to being the big brother. With his father always working at a neighborhood deli,
and his mother fighting for every available shift at a local taqueria, Jose is often left with the
responsibility of caring for his 11-year-old sister Jasmine, and his 6-year-old brother, Johan.

So, when he comes home from soccer practice, he cooks dinner and cleans up after himself and
his siblings, finally getting around to homework when his familial responsibilities have been met.
“Yeah, I do have a mom and a dad, but at the same time, they can’t be around a lot of the time,”
he says. “So for a long time, I’ve really had to be there for my brother and sister.”

It’s a role he fills well. “I’ve never had to worry about him,” says his mother Marielena (through
Jasmine, who serves as a translator), although she admits that she initially didn’t want him to
attend Mission because she believed the school was too dangerous. “He’s always been so good in
school, and he’s always been so good with his brother and sister.”

These are the roles he relishes—those of the player, the brother, or the student who is willing to
take charge when no one else will. In group projects at school, teachers say he can be the
facilitator or the alpha dog, choosing his role based on the needs of his peers.

On the soccer field, he serves as an extension of his coach, barking out orders and directing his
teammates. Sometimes these directives are motivational—“Vamos!” “Come on!” Other times
they are tactical—“Push up!” “Move to the right!”

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Whatever the message, the delivery is always impassioned and almost always on point. “Every
team needs someone to be willing to get on everyone else and make sure they’re doing what
they need to do,” says Wilson, the assistant coach. “For us, that’s Jose.”

***

In the beginning, soccer didn’t serve as the means by which he could create a second family. It
wasn’t an escape or a refuge, or even a ticket to a life away from the low-wage jobs and high-risk
streets of the Mission. It was just fun. That was when he was eight, when he began playing in a
league for neighborhood kids.

He grew, and things changed. “When I was eleven, everybody was playing and was so excited,”
he says. “Then at twelve, it was kind of the same thing. At thirteen, some people weren’t playing
anymore. And then fourteen and fifteen there were less and less. And it seemed like whenever
you asked where somebody was, they were in juvie.”

But not Jose—not as long as his parents were pressing him to do well in school and stay out of
trouble. And definitely not as he came to realize that if you got into trouble, you lost soccer. And
if you lost soccer, you lost everything.

“I can honestly say that soccer was my motivation,” he says, acknowledging the dangers of
the Mission but insisting that he’s never even flirted with the neighborhood’s drug-riddled
underbelly. “I really never got tempted by any of that stuff. I wanted to keep playing.”

Jose knows that playing for Mission isn’t a golden ticket. Soccer isn’t everything. But it still counts
for a hell of a lot. (His girlfriend, Laura, is the goalkeeper for Mission’s girls team). Jose knows he
has other opportunities.

With a 3.4 GPA, a knack for doing well on tests, and an ability to make authority figures swoon,
he has more going for him than just his ability to stop a penalty kick. He knows there are many
paths out of the Mission. He lets himself dream.

“If I could get into Stanford or Berkeley,” he says, “I know that I could just go anywhere and do
anything. If you go to a job interview and they ask you where you went to school, and you say,
‘I went to Stanford,’ or ‘I went to Berkeley,’ then they’ll be really impressed. My parents have
always pushed me to go to college, and always wanted that to be my goal, but it’s like a double-
edged sword. Because yeah, you can do a lot if you go to college. But then also, you have to
worry about the money.”

That’s where soccer comes in. And as far as Kennedy is concerned, Guevara has what it takes to
earn a Division I scholarship. Every summer, Mission travels across the bay to UC-Berkeley’s soc-
cer camp. Last summer, Guevara drew high praise from Cal coaches. He hopes to turn that praise
into a scholarship offer. But that can wait. For now, he has a championship to win.

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***

The Bears wake up. It’s taken 25 minutes, giving up a goal, and a punch to the gut. But now, they
show that they can punch right back.

They start creating chances. Jose Mendoza, the senior striker and the team’s leading goal scorer,
gets possession 15 yards in front of the goal. He shoots hard and low, but the O’Connell keeper
punches it away, keeping it out of goal but leaving it in play.

The ball rests on the ground just feet in front of the goal, and players from both teams sprint to
the ball, but when Mission senior forward Max Rybold arrives, no one is close enough to chal-
lenge him. He barely has to touch it.

1-1.

Less than one minute later Mendoza passes the ball from the right side of the field to Isai Ro-
sales, about 15 yards in front of the goal. Recent immigrants from Guatemala, Rosales and his
twin brother Josue are both midfielders, both quiet, both smart, and both dreamers, kids who
envision themselves playing professionally someday.

Isai collects the pass from Mendoza and shoots high. O’Connell’s keeper punches it into the air,
away from goal, and right back to Isai. He lifts his foot and strikes the ball. It flies past the keeper,
kisses the far goalpost, and lands at the back of the net.

2-1, Mission.

***

At halftime, order has been restored. The players grab bottles of water and Gatorade and huddle
around Kennedy. “I said I wanted this game to be 5 to 1,” the coach says. “We got two—now go
get three more. This is our time. This is where we bury them.”

The second half begins, and the Bears are holding onto possession, rarely allowing the Boilermak-
ers any opportunity to attack. When the ball is free, the Bears are the first to seize it.

When an O’Connell player makes a good pass, the Bears are quick to react. They are darting their
way past defenders and creating multiple opportunities for shots. They just need one. One goal,
and it’s all over. One goal to break the Boilermakers’ will, to deliver the Bears the championship.
And at this moment, Kennedy expects that goal to come from one of his seniors.

Last night, Mission ended its final practice of the season with a time-honored ritual. First, they
ran—of course. They ran like they loved it, like they were reveling in the pain. In between sprints,
Jose Guevara leapt up and down, egging his teammates on, and they all screamed “Vamos!” as if
they were daring their coach to make them sprint just one more time.

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Finally they stopped. Kennedy called them over into a huddle, and he told them to get in a line. “It’s
time to honor our seniors,” Kennedy said, gesturing for them to come forward, “because this is the
last time they will ever practice with this team and on this field.”

Jose Mendoza stepped forward. Jose Guevara and Diego Tamayo stood next to him, one on each
side. The two juniors then grabbed the senior by the legs, laughing as they held him, and they lifted
him up so that he could sit, straddling their shoulders. Behind Mendoza, two other underclassmen
lifted Max, positioning him in the same way. After them, each of the remaining seniors found a seat
on underclassmen’s backs.

And in this manner, at the end of their last practice at Mission, the seniors were carried off the field.

***

They start creating chances. Jose Mendoza, the senior striker and the team’s leading goal scorer,
gets possession 15 yards in front of the goal. He shoots hard and low, but the O’Connell keeper
punches it away, keeping it out of goal but leaving it in play.

The ball rests on the ground just feet in front of the goal, and players from both teams sprint to the
ball, but when Mission senior forward Max Rybold arrives, no one is close enough to challenge him.
He barely has to touch it.

1-1.

Less than one minute later Mendoza passes the ball from the right side of the field to Isai Rosales,
about 15 yards in front of the goal. Recent immigrants from Guatemala, Rosales and his twin broth-
er Josue are both midfielders, both quiet, both smart, and both dreamers, kids who envision them-
selves playing professionally someday.

Mendoza takes a pass from a teammate, sprinting past defenders before exchanging two more pass-
es on his way toward goal. As Mendoza receives the ball 15 yards away from the goal, the O’Connell
defenders are confused and unable to keep up. Mendoza shoots.

It’s blocked.

Minutes later, Mendoza approaches the goal on the keeper’s right-hand side. Mendoza has Max to
his right, and only one defender standing between them, the keeper, and the goal. The defender
surges toward Mendoza, so he drops off a pass to Max. Max chips the ball, lifting it softly toward
goal. The O’Connell keeper stretches out his arms, trying desperately to get a fingertip on the ball as
it sails over his hand. It continues to sail, right over the net.

There will be no game-clinching goal from a senior. The chances are there. The finishing is not. For
Mission to win, they’ll need to hold on.

The half wears on and Mission maintains control, but their inability to convert goal-scoring chances
leaves O’Connell with a hope that they can still tie the game. But it seems like no more than a hope.
The Boilermakers are standing around, unable to sprint with the same intensity as the Bears.

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But as the game bleeds into stoppage time, O’Connell striker Emmanuel Caldera takes the ball,
showing everyone in the stadium that not all of the Boilermakers are gasping for air. He puts his
left foot on top of the ball and brushes it to the side, stutter-stepping before making the same
move again. With the second motion, he creates a sliver of space between himself and the de-
fender. From 18 yards away, his left foot strikes. The ball is a laser, rotating at an alarming speed,
slicing past defenders and heading toward the far goalpost before bending back toward the net.
Guevara dives. Fully outstretched, his body flies through the air, his limbs on a mission to collide
with the ball.

He misses.
2-2.

The whistle blows. Overtime. On the O’Connell sideline, pandemonium. On the Mission sideline,
shock.

***

Overtime consists of two halves, each one 10 minutes long. If the game remains tied after over-
time, there will be a five-minute sudden death period. If no one scores then, the teams will be
crowned co-champions. No one wants to be crowned co-champions.

“That’s a bunch of California hug-it-out bullshit,” says Kennedy, a native New Yorker. “Fuck that.”
Deep into overtime, the game still tied, Kennedy summons Diego Tamayo from the bench.

Tamayo twisted his ankle earlier in the game, and he came off the field to give it some rest. At 6
feet, Tamayo is the tallest player on the team, and Kennedy sends him back into the game, hope-
ful that he can score on a header.

From the right side of the field, Maynor Escalante drills the ball into the air, sending it on a per-
fect line directly toward Tamayo’s head. The goalkeeper stumbles, falling out of position, unable
to reach the ball before the ball reaches Tamayo. Standing just feet in front of the goal, Tamayo
waits for the ball to connect with his head.

Touch it right, and he’s a hero.

***

The Diego Tamayo who has a chance to end this game is not the same Diego Tamayo who arrived
at pre-season practice two years ago. Then he was a pudgy freshman. Now he’s a sturdily-built ju-
nior. Then his head was covered with a slicked-back, plain-looking mop. Now he has a freshly-cut
faux-hawk, hair so perfectly messy that it’s made him a heartthrob on campus, his fast-growing
machismo drawing the affection of girls.

Then his GPA was below 2.0. Now he has a 3.6. On the soccer field, Tamayo showed potential as
a freshman, but now he’s developed into a bull, out-muscling his opponents in pursuit of the ball.
And with his peers he is a lightning rod, a center of irrepressible activity, whether in the form a
quickly-spun spanglish joke or a well-delivered playful smack.

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But ask him about himself, and the seemingly-omnipresent smile is replaced by a stoic look
with intermittent flashes of a shy grin. His eyes look down. His hands fidget, playing with his cell
phone. He speaks haltingly. And little by little, he tells his story.

He grew up in a small town in the Mexican state of Michoacan, located in the southern half of
the country, on the west coast. His apartment was small, but ample. He played volleyball, be-
cause he was tall and this was Mexico, so he lorded over the net. He played soccer, because he
was breathing and this was Mexico, so he had no other choice.

His father died when he was four. Car crash. Ask if he remembers him, and he just laughs and
shakes his head. There is little else to tell, he says. This was not the Mexico of drug wars and un-
speakable poverty. There was enough food. He was always safe. But neither was this the land of
the Mexican elite. His family was not rich. They knew better opportunity awaited elsewhere.

When Diego was 13, they came to San Francisco, settling in an apartment downtown, in a neigh-
borhood safer than the Mission (Because of San Francisco’s zoning laws, many students attend
schools outside of their own neighborhoods). Ask him about the move, and he finally looks up.
The smile returns. The eyes ignite. “Right away,” he says, “I loved everything about it.” Every-
thing, that is, except school. As a middle-schooler, Diego was bored and disinterested. He cared
little and tried even less. But then he got to Mission. Kennedy got ahold of him. And things
started to change..

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“Everybody said that Kennedy was rude, and that he said things to get people mad,” Tamayo
says, laughing and shaking his head. “And at first I was like, ‘Damn, they’re right.’ But I didn’t
worry too much about it. I just wanted to play.”

But in order to play, he had to raise his grades. Since it was early in his freshman year, it only took
a few weeks of dedicated work to meet the GPA requirement. With soccer as his motivation, he
reached the 2.0 minimum. Along the way, he discovered that school wasn’t so bad. The GPA kept
climbing. Now, it’s a 3.6. “I see how much it matters now,” he says. “Now you have to start think-
ing about where you want to go and what you want to be. It didn’t matter before.”

Like Guevara, Tamayo dreams of going to Berkeley. And as with Guevara, Kennedy believes Diego
has the talent to earn a Division 1 scholarship. But although they’re the same age, Tamayo can’t
match Guevara’s maturity (Few 17-year-olds can). Diego still shows up late for practice some-
times. When not paying attention, he still draws Kennedy’s ire. He says he can handle the yelling.
But sometimes, he cries.

“Diego has a lot of anger inside him,” says Guevara. “He just gets really emotional. Sometimes it’s
a good thing. Sometimes it isn’t.”

After Mission was beaten by O’Connell in the regular season, the Bears players sat stunned
around Kennedy, all devastated by the loss. The score had been 3-0, and Kennedy was seething.
On the edge of the circle, Diego sat and sobbed.

“Diego, why are you crying?” Kennedy barked.

Diego kept looking down.
“Look at me, Diego! Why are you crying?”
Diego barely looked up. He mumbled unintelligibly.
“What?” Kennedy asked.
“Because I wanted to win,” Diego said.
“Because you wanted to win,” Kennedy repeated. “Because you wanted to win.”
Kennedy stared darts into Diego as the players waited for the tirade that was surely coming next.
It never came.
“If every one of you cared half as much as he cares, and if every one of you played half as hard as
he played, there’s no way we would have lost this game.”
Kennedy would later say, “He’s 17 years old, and he’s just now learning how to cry. It’s a hard
thing to learn at that age.”

The ball now sails, rotating down toward Diego’s head, several feet clear of any O’Connell defend-
er. It hits Diego squarely on the forehead, exactly where he wants it, exactly as Kennedy planned
when he sent the junior back into the game. Diego knocks the ball back across the goal, far out of
the keeper’s reach.

It bounces once on the ground, still in play.

Several O’Connell players raise their arms over the heads, already mourning the inevitable goal.

It bounces twice.

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It’s still 2-2.

Overtime ends. The sudden death period begins. Any goal will instantly end the game. The play-
ers have raced up and down the field for 100 minutes, and now they must race up and down it
for five more.

Only it doesn’t take nearly that long.

The game-ender is simple, the kind of kick that would have been a laser at the game’s outset but
is no more than a dribbler now. Jonathan Soto—O’Connell’s senior captain—takes a pass from a
teammate while standing with a perfect angle on the goal. Guevara plays his position well, but
there is nothing he can do. Soto pushes it forward.

3-2.

It’s the end of the game, and as predicted, someone is crying. This time, it’s the Bears.

***

A week later, all the characters are back together, all on the same field. This time, the Bears and
Boilermakers are teammates. Kennedy is sitting in his folded down chair barking instructions on
the sideline. “All week, it has felt like someone has been kicking me in the nuts over, and over,
and over again,” he says. Guevara is stretching again, preparing to settle into the goal. Along the
sidelines, Jose Mendoza, Max Rybold, and other Bears pass a ball back and forth. They’re joined
by Emmanuel Caldera and Jonathan Soto, O’Connell’s leading goal-scorers.

It’s the city all-star game, which pits teams from the eastern half of the city against teams from
the western half. And in this game, O’Connell and Mission play side-by-side.

“It feels natural,” says Guevara. “It’s the way things are supposed to be.”

Kennedy finds himself humbled by the politeness of the O’Connell players. The same kids who
fought against his team with such passion now look him in the eye as they shake his hand.
“As much as I don’t like O’Connell,” he says, “I can’t help but love O’Connell. Because the
O’Connell kid and the Mission kid—they’re the same kid.”

Today, those kids coast to a 3-2 win over the west-side All-Stars. Mission and O’Connell players
dominate the lineup. As the head coach of the all-star team, Kennedy gives a little more playing
time to O’Connell’s players than his own. They are, after all, the champions.

When the game ends, they all stand together and eat pizza, laughing and talking and reminiscing
about the season. And together, they walk away. Away from the field, away from the competi-
tion, away from the game they love. They walk toward the buses that will take them back to the
Mission District. There, they will all be home.

***

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 About Jordan Conn

Jordan Conn is a freelance journalist and aspiring good man who has
contributed to the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, among
others. More of his work can be seen at his website.

photographs by Helene Goupil

At The Good Men Project Magazine, we write, discuss,

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men and about men in today’s world. Real, honest,
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