Late afternoon is turning into early evening at Forestwood Park in Ferguson, and Kaeden Watkins, an 8-year-old from Florissant, slows down enough to reflect on his new-found sport of soccer.
“What I really like about this is that you get to kick balls and do your best. It’s just fun,” he said. “I’m getting way better. I’m learning how to do the side kick and how to keep it up in the air.”
His buddy Jaxson Reeves, also 8, also from Florissant, has to pause to consider what he likes about soccer.
“It’s so complicated,” he said. “I like running because it’s kind of like track but there’s dribbling. I like how you kick balls and you go this way, that way, this way, that way, and that way, all over the place. And you have a big field, you can still kick it.”
The two are participants in a program called City Futures, run by St. Louis City SC, the Major League Soccer expansion franchise that begins play next season. From its inception, the club has wanted to reach out to the St. Louis soccer community at large and especially to under-served areas, like North County.
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City Futures holds free weekly soccer classes for children from 7 to 14 (advance signups are required on the team’s website), designed to be supplemental to any leagues that they may be playing. Eventually, there will be clinics meeting one day a week at five locations around the region. Right now, there are four: Mondays in Ferguson to the north, Wednesdays at Bayless High in South County, Thursdays at Fairmont City in the Metro East and Fridays at Cardinal Ritter High in downtown. A Tuesday program in University City, which will be the program’s westernmost location, will start in October. These sessions, called Way To Play, will run year round, with only a few weeks off throughout the year and move indoors in the winter months to play futsal. (The club has a separate program, called Soccer 101, which offers one-time clinics for newcomers in Forest Park. The next one is in October.)
The program is run by Sascha Bauer, who like City SC sporting director Lutz Pfannenstiel, is a German who has traveled the world with soccer. Bauer has created programs like this in Germany, South Africa and Brazil and coached Mozambique’s under-17 national team. He said he’s taken a bit from all of his stops and put them together into the City Futures program.
“The earlier they fall in love with the sport, the better it is,” said Bauer. “I hope this will continuously grow, as people realize we are not there for a short program. This program is supposed to last many years.
“We highly believe in the model of play-practice-play. When I grew up, and many world-class players grew up, playing small-sided games on the street and we want to bring this street soccer style of playing to the training ground. That’s one of the objectives. We’re offering technical coaching, we are taking care as well of social and emotional learning because we believe a holistic approach is very important nowadays.”
While the teaching topic at Forestwood on this day was juggling, the field was filled with small mini-goals for regular one-on-one games between participants. “The main focus is playing,” Bauer said. “We always play small-sided games.”
“We have a lot of kids that are really bad and a lot that are really good,” said Elena Huffman, one of the coaches, “but no one ever really knows because we play so much so the kids don’t have time to judge and compare.”
Bauer met Pfannenstiel in Brazil prior to the World Cup there in 2014, where Bauer was running programs in conjunction with soccer great Ronaldinho’s group Bola Pra Frente (Let’s Go On) and the two stayed in touch. When Pfannenstiel wanted to reach out to youngsters in St. Louis, he turned to Bauer.
The team wanted to put the clinics in areas of St. Louis where there may not be too much soccer training going on. (“There’s a lot of soccer out there in Creve Coeur already so we want to stick closer to the city,” Bauer said.) Ferguson was chosen specifically to be the site for North St. Louis.
“I’ve learned several things about St. Louis in the first six months,” said Bauer. “I know about the history of Ferguson and it was definitely a conscious decision because there’s not been so many of the big clubs going there in the last years since 2014. And we want to offer the African American kids, which are predominant in Ferguson, an opportunity to join soccer. You look at MLS, African American players are still not as many as in other sports and we would definitely love to have more kids of the African-American St. Louis community joining.
“And it has been happening. In Ferguson, we have a very diverse and mixed group there, it looks really good. We have lots of young kids there, which is great, because that’s where everything starts. The earlier we can bring soccer to people’s lives, the better it is.”
“I think it’s good to see it here in Ferguson,” said Amanda Owens, as she sat on the side of the field while two of her children took part in the session, “and seeing all the kids doing something like this represents my truth Ferguson, because it’s family-friendly, family-oriented, Black and white, Asian, Latino, all the different people and races and families coming together, raising their families, so this to me is a true picture of what Ferguson is rather than how the media wants to (portray it). (That) is not my Ferguson. This is Ferguson.”
“I like it a lot,” said Shalon Gates, also from Ferguson. “It’s a blessing that they chose Ferguson as the location for this program. My 11-year-old loves soccer, wants to be involved in soccer training and soccer camps but usually they’re so far from North County and so much out of the way, not to mention expensive, that I’ve had to tell him no on numerous occasions. When this opportunity arose we signed up immediately; not only is it in our neighborhood, I love they’re doing so much on small-group training. He’s learning some skills that even playing at some of the rec organizations, you don’t get a lot of that.”
Bauer hopes to use soccer as a unifying factor in the community with an event called the St. Louis City Cup, which would bring players from the various sites together for a tournament, but not with south against north or east vs. west. Players from the different venues would be mixed together on teams, allowing them to play with children they might otherwise never come in contact with. And while one of the goals of the program is to make better soccer players, there is also a goal of unifying the community.
“We have another big objective in the City Futures program, we want to contribute to break some barriers, work strategically against segregation that has been happening here in St. Louis,” Bauer said. “(They play) in mixed teams with the idea they learn from each other. … Trying to promote empathy and growing quickly together because that normally doesn’t happen where you get together with a player from another neighborhood on one team. That is one of the big goals.”
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