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Nothing says high school sports like bad music over a worse PA system, like bad food with worse service, like coaches, officials, and referees yelling at each other as if they were the children. Some things never change, but some do. Martin Luther King Jr. High School lost the New York City Soccer Championship last year, only the second time in ten years the trophy didn’t reside in their glass case. It was last year’s championship game, a defeat at the hands of neighborhood rivals Beacon - sent home by MLK in the semi-finals 4-0 last week – since I had spent time with the team, and change was on the mind for all of us. King, though, was trying to direct the change.

Although I couldn’t see it – “Here we come again. Same old King again,” as their team anthem goes – it had been a year of changes for MLK – a new assistant coach, new uniforms, a dozen-odd freshman added to the roster, their best graduated player leaving for the 2nd Division in Ukraine. King was looking to return to normalcy with a championship. 8 out of the last 10 years it had been theirs, and the 9 seniors who knew the pain of losing, wanted to reclaim what was theirs, if for no other reason, because they didn’t know anything else. Last season they avoided change, but this year, change is on their side.

On the bus on the way to the game, Coach Martin (Jake) Jacobson talked about more changes. Never one to avoid a good superstition, Jake changed everything he could to rid the memory of last season, New shirt, new shoes, new places to keep his lucky crystal and mix-mash collection of spiritual goodies, and even a new bus driver to take the team to a field that Jake specifically worked on to ensure it was different from the field last year, a narrow American football field that he still blames in part for last year’s defeat.

The perfect field for MLK’s style – stretch it wide and move it fast, creating gaps for through balls from the feat of a superior midfield led by MVP Steven Amaya - was on Randall’s Island, the not so famous brother of Rikers, where the infamous jail resides. The island is a giant, city-owned, urban playground resting in the middle of New York’s East River. Fields abound as they almost always have here, but that’s not to say it hasn’t seen a few changes. For one, elevated highway construction is going on here like they’re giving away the concrete for free. It was my first time on Randall’s, and before the game, Mickey, MLK’s Goalkeeper Coach, gave me a history lesson in his classic New York accent. Today’s soccer pitch stands in the southerly shadow of Icahn Stadium, once Downing Stadium, which was one of the homes for Pele and the Cosmos. Mickey, in a hey can you believe it kind of way, barked as he kind of always does about seeing Pele score a bicycle kick when he was a little kid. Right here when it was still Downing Stadium. Mickey went to those games, right here, fell in love with soccer as a kid, right here, and now is about to coach more kids, maybe just like him, or maybe the next Pele, right here. Given my peripatetic tendencies and need for change, it impressed me Mickey’s sense of home.

waiting for the bus, the team passes time outside Martin Luther King Jr. High School

The more things change, the more they stay the same. An unusually mild mid-November day. High 60’s; a few passing clouds; bright, bright sun that ensured my night would be penciled in for fighting a monster headache, thanks to a lack of sunglasses and being forced to squint most of 9 hours. 8am was meeting time this morning back at the high school on Manhattan’s upper west side. Some of the kids were up at dawn to make it there, but Jake wanted to leave time for the inevitable delays wrought from 30-odd kids having to trek a commute, as long as 45-minute for some. King had its usual season, which is to say undefeated. There was the usual issues of players making grades, off-the-field trouble – this year it was a player getting stabbed outside a McDonald’s – and Jake’s near-constant battle with school politics, at least some of which I’d wager is self imposed. Another day, another season, the calendar turns for King.

ESPN Deportes focused its cameras on MLK this season, including these pre-game moments

The B-league championship, between schools relegated as I understand it in a similar way to the English Premier League, was beginning at 10am. We arrive at a little before 10 after a 15-minute bus ride. There is a reason it is the B-league. Aside from one or two talented players, it’s kick and run. One of the teams won on penalty kicks. I didn’t pay much attention. The team passed the pre-game down time as soccer kids do, listening to iPods, juggling the soccer ball, goofing with friends and family. It’s a year later, but the guys seem stuck in a time warp from my perspective. I haven’t really seen them anywhere but in this team environment, and that hasn’t changed. The West Africans sit and talk, their softer voices and personalities overwhelmed by the volume of the more rambunctious Mexican and Central American contingent. A few white or European kids mix within subgroups. Besides the fact they rarely ever play, you almost forget they are there, they are absorbed into the traveling carnival that is King.

Last year’s game was hair-pulling 0-0 draw until the second overtime. King dominated the entire game, but let one pass as their overwhelmingly more numerous opportunities went unfinished. This year, they ensured that would change. In the eighth minute striker Christian Mendoza – my pick for most improved thanks to his skyrocketing increase in focus – caught a cross from left wing Byron Garcia and laced an instep volley past the league’s supposed best keeper. It would not be his best day, something MLK’s goalkeeper Luis Balbuena, who may argue ownership of that ‘best’ title, had to enjoy.

Jake not letting the smallest mistakes avert his attention

Partway through the second half, it’s 2-0. A cross comes into the box, and in a surge of bodies, the ball finds the back of the net. From my vantage point, I couldn’t see how it went in. In the rush of action the goalie is injured and is down for some time. A good five, ten minutes passes and he’s still down, nothing serious it seemed, but he took his time while attended to by coaches. At some point the King team congregates in front of the modest-sized, portable grandstand on the opposite side of the field from the team benches were I am sitting, and poses for a team photo. A team photo-op in the middle of the championship game. I can only assume it began with a few kids talking to friends or family in the stands during the break in action and one then pulling out a point-and-shoot. It’s all a little to much for me to think it was orchestrated by the team, and up 3-0, it would seem logical that the team is in good enough spirits to oblige such an proposal. But a photo-op in the middle of the game? The opposing bench wasn’t too happy about it. What to make of it? Not much I figured in the moment. Kids do stupid things. Placing it into the lot of my MLK soccer memories, of which there are many, though gave me another thought. it’s the perfect reflection of this team caught in a rare moment. After the game, Matt Gagne from the Daily News put icing on this perfect little MLK cake when he tried to obviously bait Jake with a question worded something like “Do you think it’s a good thing for your players to be taking pictures in the middle of a game while there is an injury,” followed by “Hey, I’ve got to ask the questions.”

Was it cocky and a maybe a bit in poor taste, competitive athletes savoring the taste of blood before the death strike? Yes. But were they excited teenagers instead of Terrel Owens celebrating on the Dallas Cowboy star (when he was a 49er)? Yes. Was it also a group of teenagers who have been through everything together, both on and off the field, victory and loss, culminating in one moment of acting before thinking, capturing in 1/500th of a second the pure join of seeing their hard work about to pay off? It’s your call. It came together for a brief moment and then dissipated back into the demanding action of life. And all of that – the brash cockiness, the love, the smiles, the baiting press, the whining opposition, the team, the family - is King Soccer. That’s what makes just another soccer team in the national rankings – they’re as high as 4 by the way in the several polls – something really special. It’s what makes someone like me, who can’t be pulled away for a MLS game, wake up at 7 in the morning to watch a high school match.

I don’t know how a white guy from Brooklyn gets this raw bunch of kids from all of the world together on the same page long enough to create this kind of game, but it happens, and when it does, its beautiful on any soccer scale. The central midfield play is better than I have ever seen at this level. The sense of field and space and the ability to protect the ball, which is maybe the single greatest thing a team can do at this level, is better than I remember from last year. The striker and wings don’t ever seem to stop running, and a defense rarely needed, except to trap and distribute what in my childhood we called a boom-ball, where an opposing player just kicks the ball up in the air and downfield with hopes of something, anything, still manages to protect when called upon. Before beginning play, I didn’t think the team had changed much, but on the field they had. They got better.

When it was all said and done, King would be champion, sending Lehman High School home to the count of 4-0, and completing a post-season campaign that saw not a single goal. And as many people felt last Wednesday morning – I voted – all was again right with the world. Everything went right with King today. I’d call it a perfect day if it wasn’t for the PSAL (Public Schools Athletic League). In an no doubt honest effort to ‘make this game special’ they did the following: played the FIFA anthem, whose rules by the way don’t govern high school soccer; they blared horrible techno music through popping speakers during breaks in play; they had some kid controlling the scoreboard who was too busy talking on his cell phone to keep up with the goals, and some Jason Whitlock look-a-like manned the microphone tryng to juice up his announcements with a roaring tumble of a voice (there is a reason people get paid to do this at professional sporting events) and who had apparently heard somewhere that after a goal in a soccer match the announcer must scream GOAAAAL at the top of his lungs. If only they would play the “ole” song once or twice. Oh wait, they played it at least 72 times.

It was like letting the Pope pick the music at your prom. There is no putting into words how un-hip and amateur the entire event was. I know its high school, but the PSAL officials, those in charge of the league, not just putting on this game, spent most of their time posturing their jurisdiction over anybody and anything that moved in general direction. Coaches from other teams not even in the game were sitting on the MLK bench eating cheeseburgers and voicing their displeasure with the success of King while encouraging the opposing team. It took an overly aggressive vocal outburst by Jake to send two hefty PSAL-ers into motion to rectify the obvious problem. Money that no doubt could have been put toward, I don’t know, hiring good people who know how to organize and run an event, was instead spent on a dozen or more armed police officers whose presence was completely unnecessary. No, seriously, thank god that armed cop is here to make sure errant soccer balls don’t roll onto the field. All the mistakes, poor decisions, and mismanagement I remembered from last year hadn’t changed one bit. The whole of PSAL seems to be set up on fear. Too bad they don’t have midterm elections.

Photo Gallery

the sun sets on another season

post-game celebration for ESPN Deportes…

trophy ceremony

Coaches Mickey and Jake with MVP Steven Amaya

ESPN Deportes post-game interview