Editorial Intern
A parent was poised to write the check out to coach Derek Espinoza for his son to play soccer, but soon couldn’t. “He got laid off the day before,” Espinoza said. “It’s a sign of the times.”
Espinoza put out a call on Facebook. “There is a Long Beach boys soccer team full of ambitious little athletes who will not be able to play this season if they don’t get some assistance,” he wrote. The U9 team (meaning, boys born after Aug. 1, 2003) hopes to participate in the Football Club Long Beach (FCLB). Espinoza said FCLB fees typically total between $1,200 and $1,700 per child for the whole year.
“For this, they heard we had a good group of kids, so they brought down the fees,” Espinoza said. “And then the coach position is actually supposed to be a paid position, but I told then I won’t get paid…so now we’ve got it down to $900 per kid, per year.” Espinoza, who is senior mortgage advisor at First Cal Mortgage, has sponsored the team alone so far. “Right now, I’ve been buying the uniforms,” he said.
Espinoza had played soccer since he was about 6 years old, and he continued playing when he went to El Camino College. He studied fire science there and planned to become a fireman and move onto a four-year college. “And then [I] had brain surgery, and that’s when everything stopped for me,” he said. Espinoza turned his head and gestured to a long, conspicuous scar running from his lower skull to the nape of his neck. He had had the brain problem since birth, but it wasn’t discovered until then, around 1996. He could no longer be a fireman or a soccer player. In 2004, he had a son and began coaching.
The kids that compose the hopeful team is cobbled together from other teams that Espinoza has coached and the local Futsal, or indoor soccer, facility. Espinoza paid the $600 registration fee recently, but that isn’t enough. “Now it’s the mad dash of coming up with this dollar figure for the kids so they can actually follow through and play,” he said. He estimated the total fee for all 12 kids at $10,800, given that the cost is $900 per child.
Paulina Gonzalez is the mother of one of the children. Her son began playing when he was 4, and he practices with the team every Monday and Thursday for about an hour and a half. They met Espinoza through the American Youth Soccer Organization and the local Futsal. “Right now, we have two other children besides him. We have to keep them involved in sports also,” Gonzalez said. “It’s hard to come up with the money. It’s an extra expense.”
Gonzalez noted that her family will have to make some sacrifices without the sponsorship. They’ll have to eat out less as a family and budget themselves even more tightly. “There’s a child that Derek was trying to get on the team,” Gonzalez noted, “and his parents were both out of work, and they can’t possibly pay for soccer if they’re barely surviving.” Without money for some of the parents eventually, Gonzalez doesn’t think there will be a team.
The season has technically already begun, having started July 1, but the games don’t start until the beginning of September. Over the summer, tournaments regularly provide playing opportunities— so long as the team has fully paid for everything. “Now, I have some of the parents within the last couple of weeks coming to me,” Espinoza said, “and going, ‘Okay, Derek, here’s the truth. We really want our kid to play, but here’s the situation.'” Espinoza feels a sense of urgency to secure more funding in time before September and pay everything early enough that the boys can practice at tournaments before the games begin.
Espinoza doesn’t want economic circumstance to prevent talented kids from playing club soccer. “When I was younger, I was decent, and I was asked to do certain things with certain teams, and my parents didn’t have these kinds of resources, and so I had seen kids— and not to brag about my talent or anything like that— but I’d seen people that I was considered better than, or I knew that I could be better than, but because the parents could afford it they were getting these very good opportunities.
“Some of them went to Europe to play professionally, some of them went on to large colleges to play. Back when I was growing up…soccer wasn’t really getting as much of the attention, dollar-wise.” Espinoza said. “I just look at my past. I want to help these kids so they don’t have to think the ‘what ifs.’ I’m trying to maybe break some kind of cycle— bring some more awareness to these kids who are so good.”
Gonzalez’s son is currently 8 years old. “He loves [soccer]. He loves playing. Even when he’s not at practice, he’s with friends,” Gonzalez said. “They’re always playing soccer. You always see my son with a soccer ball, playing, kicking the ball.”
Espinoza is available at (562) 619-3804 or despinoza@firstcal.net for sponsorship inquiries.
