For schools in Sacramento, high school soccer has a different look than wealthy suburbs

Jason Wharton, the Hiram Johnson High School boys’ soccer coach, had a message for his team after a 3-2 win over Florin a few weeks ago. A game earlier in the season had been postponed. He was thinking of rescheduling the game for Saturday. Half the bench groaned. Saturday’s not going to work coach.

The lackluster response was because Johnson, like many schools in Sacramento, has a roster filled with kids who have other responsibilities. While top soccer teams in the area come from wealthier suburbs or private schools, some Johnson players work. They help family members at their jobs. They babysit their siblings.

“They say ‘That’s when I help my dad with construction. That’s when I help paint houses with my family, when I go help my uncle landscape, you know, things like that,” Wharton said. “It’s very, very challenging.

“We have never had all 22 players here at any one time. All year long.”

The haves and have-nots

Unlike football, soccer is ruled by club teams that play mostly year-round. Kids around the Sacramento area must pay to be on club teams, with fees ranging from $2,500 to $5,000, according to a USA Today analysis from 2017. Add in travel costs – club teams play in tournaments around the country, but primarily in California and on the West Coast – and parents can easily spend $10,000 a year on club soccer.

For a few months, club players leave the club teams and play for their high schools. When their high school team loses in the playoffs, they switch back to playing club soccer on a daily basis.

At Grant High School, in Sacramento’s Del Paso Heights neighborhood, parents are not going to spend $10,000 a year on club soccer. During the regular season, which ended last week, Grant players practice and play games most days of the week. When the season is over, Grant players go to public parks and play each other, coach Mong Vue said.

“It’s really on them,” Vue said. “Because they go to the park. They play together, they get their friends together, and they play together.”

Wharton, the Johnson coach, nodded in agreement. Yep, that’s what his kids do as well, maybe once a week in the offseason.

At Florin High School, which is in the Elk Grove Unified School District. The school is on the south side of Sacramento, with almost every player is from a minority groups. It’s the same at Grant and Johnson.

No sob stories here, it’s just a lot of kids whose parents work blue-collar jobs for a living said Jonathan Felix, the Florin coach. A few kids play club soccer and the talent shines on the field. For the rest, work schedules and family commitments make for a complicated offseason.

“I usually get them together,” Felix said. “We come over here once a week, you know, once every two weeks, something like that, just to give them a refresher of like, ‘Hey, these are your teammates. This is how we play this is how we do it here at this house.’”

Soccer skills

The Grant players don’t look like a ragtag bunch. In a January game against McClatchy, the Pacers displayed loads of individual skills. There was crafty footwork and adept passing. Goalkeeper Julian Rico Moreno made nice saves in the first half, then played as a central midfielder in the second. Junior striker Maurice Davis showed power and speed. And Vue, the coach, said Cristian Gomez could be a Division I or Division II college player if he had been able to stay in club soccer.

Sure, these guys have skills. But there are more junior varsity players than parents watching most of their games. And colleges stopped scouting high school games long ago.

“You don’t really get that exposure with high school soccer compared to club soccer,” Vue said. “They might be able to go play in junior college. So hopefully some of these guys, I inspire them and they know that even though you’re not playing club soccer, you can still go on to the next level.”

If colleges were looking for raw talent at these schools, they might find guys like Davy Padilla at Johnson. His high school coach, Wharton, raves about Padilla’s skill set. He played with Sacramento Republic’s youth academy for two years and it shows on the field. Padilla’s passing, vision and footwork would fit with many area high school teams.

“David’s an incredible story,” Wharton said. “He started off with Sacramento Republic academy, and then didn’t didn’t have the growth spurt that everybody else did. So he was one of the smallest guys. … But you could see some of the best skills and the hard work ethic.”

Padilla doesn’t see a big difference when he talks about playing for Johnson, as opposed to a soccer powerhouse like Jesuit or Davis. The heart for the game is the same at Johnson as it is at those other schools. Plus Johnson is home for him and the Warriors aren’t steamrolling past teams.

“I prefer playing here than Jesuit,” Padilla said. “It’s fun. The intensity is better. Because at Jesuit, you know they are going to win every year, or something like that. Here, it’s competitive.”

Soccer and real life

The Sac-Joaquin Section is quick to draw fire from coaches for things it does wrong, but coaches in the Greater Sacramento League are quick to credit the section for creating a competitive conference for them. Schools in the Greater Sacramento League would not be competitive in the Sierra Foothill League, which has schools in the weathly suburbs of Folsom, El Dorado Hills and Granite Bay. Valley and Cordova ran away from teams at the top of the league this season, but Johnson and Florin were competitive. West Park, a new school, struggled and Natomas can be good, too.

Bill Kapp, Florin’s athletic director, stood next to the soccer field to watch visiting Johnson play his squad in January. The Greater Sacramento League is a boon for his school in all sports, he said, because teams at Florin aren’t heavy with kids who play club sports year-round. Neither do any of the other schools in the league. It’s a fair fight, he said.

“I think the section took a look and they did a really good job of comparing competitive equity, or at least that’s what they were trying to do,” Kapp said. “That’s the equation that can almost never be solved right? Because not everyone’s happy. But at least for us, our school is pretty much at the same level as other schools because they have similar problems that we have … we’re kind of in the same boat.”

It’s a similar situation over in the Metropolitan Conference, McClatchy ran away with the league title again, but Grant racked up an 8-4-4 overall record and 5-2-3 mark in league play. And several Grant players impressed McClatchy coaches during a game in mid January, with opposition coaches saying “wow” at some of the individual skills on display.

No player on the Grant roster is active on a club team, Vue said. About half Johnson’s roster played club. Felix, the Florin coach, said he has a half-dozen club players on his varsity team. The rest are kids that play for years and then decide to give organized soccer a shot.

“Some of them end up having some raw talent, some raw skills that you can use in particular instances,” he said.

And those players with raw talent come with a different set of issues than a typical club player. Wharton, the Johnson coach, isn’t mad or frustrated when he talks about his team. Quite the opposite. He’s proud of his players for the work they put in, both the paying kind and the unpaid kind on the soccer field. Coaches at Grant, Florin and Johnson face challenges, but they’re still wildly proud of their teams. Just like any other coach.

“There’s players missing a day of practice or a game, some of them have to watch little brothers and sisters because mom and dad are going to work a little bit earlier and things like that,” Wharton said. “So a lot of adversity. But you know, their families are strong, right? You know, their families are strong.”