Gathered on a remote field during a warm and sunny spring afternoon, soccer players are participating in two rondos, the Spanish word for a game of keep-away in which players are usually allowed just one touch to move the ball.
Talking and joking — and occasionally complimenting one another on a quality touch — the collection of players on Verde Valley School’s coed soccer team represents 11 nations from around the world. Although enrollment requirements at VVS include a proficient level of English, these boys and girls also communicate through the international language of soccer, or football, depending on which country you are from.
“It’s the international language, football is the international language,” Coyotes head coach and England native Andy Gill said. “They can not speak any words that each other recognizes, and they would understand what it means to go and play.”
Like most languages, there are dialects within each tongue, and soccer is no different. Soccer is taught and played in a variety of ways across the world. Brazil is known for its flashy play, defined by Brazilians as a way of expressing themselves, while England is typically associated with a physical brand. Similar to Brazil, Spain is known for its style, while in Italy they talk a lot about tactical discipline.
“I think it’s just a challenge to make sure that everyone understands the system that you’re using and the way you want to play the game, and that just comes from repetition, repetition, repetition,” Gill said.
With players from Japan, Rwanda, Italy, China, Germany, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, the Phillipines and the United States, it would be tough to mix the melting pot of ideas and skills into one team.
Under Gill’s guidance, the team plays the Verde Valley School system, and does it well. At the conclusion of the Canyon Athletic Association Division 1 coed regular season, the Coyotes were 10-1-2.
Both losses came at the hands of the always-strong Orme School, both by one-goal margins. The team tied the regular season finale 2-2 with Phoenix College Preparatory Academy on April 23.
“It’s gone really well, it’s been a good season, better than I expected maybe,” Gill said. “In both those [against Orme] I thought we were the better team, obviously I’m a little biased, but I think we were the better team, and they were just more powerful than we were. It’s been a good season, the nice thing is we haven’t really come across anybody that we know that we can’t beat.”
Gill also pointed out that his group of girls is better than the rest of the teams’. Six boys and five girls must be playing at all times, and their quailty helps put the Coyotes a step above.
“What we find is that against many of the teams, they have four or five really good guys, and it’s almost like they’re playing amongst themselves,” Gill said. “Whereas one of our stronger players is Daisy [Karekezi], our center midfielder, and she’s phenomenal.”
The Coyotes took the No. 2 seed into the CAA Division 1 State Championship Tournament’s quarterfinal against Foothills Academy College Preparatory. In a rematch of last year’s quarterfinal, this time the Coyotes won 6-2.
They moved on to play against BASIS – Phoenix in the semifinal on Thursday, May 3, but results were unavailable at press time. VVS beat BASIS – Phoenix 2-1 in the penultimate game of the regular season.
Leading the team in the goal scoring category is midfielder Pietro “Roberto” Pirreca with a resounding 26 goals and 10 assists in 11 games played. Pirreca is a native of Sicily, Italy, and was brought up through the youth system of U.S. Citta di Palermo, a professional club in Serie B, or Italian soccer’s professional second division.
On the other hand, there is Karekezi of Kigali, Rwanda, or forward Houcine Elattir. Elattir learned the game playing street soccer, with little formal instruction. He has eight goals and 24 assists.
Defensively, there is the centerback partnership of Cape Cod, Mass., native and sophomore captain Edward Xu and Yichuan “Nemo” Xie of China. Collectively they have been the backbone of a defense that has given up 23 goals and held opponents to one or fewer goals on five occasions.
“I think different people from different cultures, they play the game differently, so it helps to add to the game. It mixes it up and I like it a lot,” Xu said. “The other centerback, he’s from China, and the partnership we’ve built, it’s great.”
Gill was been able to mesh the talents together, and early on the Coyotes realized what potential they had. Last year’s team qualified eighth for the state tournament and lost in the quarterfinals.
“My goal is to always do better than the season before,” Gill said. “About five games in we realized we could do something this season.”
More than a Game
The players do not only enjoy sharing the field with one another. Concurrent with the school’s ideals in general, which has students from 18 countries, they learn about their teammates’ cultures.
Karekezi offered an example from her country, Rwanda — how most people only know of the genocide in 1994. Even the internet is guilty of it; no further than typing “Rw” into Google, and the search engine’s first automated completion is “Rwandan genocide.”
Underneath the stereotypes, Karekezi said, there is much more to learn.
“There are a lot of stereotypes in different countries and also the value of me learning about a culture from the person that’s from the culture and learning a lot more than the stereotypes that we hear,” Karekezi said. “I take that as a value because it’s the same for my country. It’s kind of annoying and hard, but I get it because [the genocide is] the only thing you hear about. I value a lot the fact that you get to sit and actually talk to people from the country and hear what they have to say and their culture.”
The international flavor of the Verde Valley School’s coed soccer team does not just blend together styles of play and schools of thought into a finished product of goals, assists, saves and wins. It breeds cultural diversity, inclusion and education that will certainly stick with the players much longer than the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
