Manchester's United Nations of Soccer

BY BRION O’CONNOR

In June of 1974, Mom uprooted my five siblings and me from our home in New Jersey and relocated to Manchester’s North End. For Mom, it was a homecoming of sorts, having grown up on Manchester’s predominantly French-Canadian West Side.

Mom’s brothers — my Uncle Arthur and Uncle Bill — played football and baseball for the Giant Killers of St. Joseph High School for Boys (now Trinity High). It was Uncle Art, a Jesuit priest, who changed the trajectory of my athletic life.

While a novitiate in Beirut, Lebanon, the future Father Pare was smitten with the global sport of “football,” or soccer. When Mom suggested that we were interested in football, Art interceded: “Jane, the boys should really play soccer.”

Our teams mirrored our town’s ethnic diversity, with Italians, Greeks, Austrians, Germans, eastern Europeans, Central Americans and South Americans. I loved it. The game was a refuge, especially after cancer claimed my father in 1971.

Moving to New Hampshire, after my sophomore year in high school, Manchester was a mystery. I expected a fairly lily-white turnout at Hillside Junior High’s rocky, undersized field. Instead, I found a group resembling the United Nations.

Manchester in 1974 wasn’t as culturally complex as it is today, but our soccer team was. There were players from assorted backgrounds, including French-Canadian (Gelinas, Cusson, Chaput, Benard), Greek (Kaliora, Lekkas, Venagas, Pashos), and Ecuadorian (Carachuelo). There was Luce, Larea, Demenchuk, Zito, Johnson, Witcher, Hamilton and Connelly. Our superb goalkeeper, Doug Zesiger, was a senior with All-American good looks. But the unquestioned stars were a pair of Colombian immigrants — Jimmy Sierra and Henry Saldariaga — and a dazzling Haitian, Danny Lascaze.

“The only school in Manchester that had ethnic diversity, and still does, was Central,” says Jim “Chick” Lekkas, a fellow junior. “This is where the inner-city kids lived and went to school. I met Jimmy (Sierra) during the summer men’s league, and asked him to try out. We couldn’t get more ethnic kids because so many must work after school.”

Despite being a newcomer, I felt right at home. We were teenagers — notorious for judging others — but everyone was far more concerned about whether I could play. That’s the beauty of sports. They’re a meritocracy.

“My first experience with real soccer came the summer following my freshman year,” says Steve Long, another junior that year. “I played a game on a team that was shorthanded, and mostly manned by folks from the Greek community. I credit those guys with my introduction to the sport, since they encouraged me to keep playing.”

Central soccer teams were rarely exceptional, but Coach Veilleux and the players realized this senior-laden squad could be. Except for one early-season hiccup against powerhouse Alvirne, we ran the table, capturing the city championship with a 12-1-1 mark. Meanwhile, I became adept at cursing in six languages, a handy skill when publicly sharing my opinions about the refs.

What we all knew, intrinsically, was that soccer rewards unselfish cooperation. Ethnicity doesn’t matter; talent and teamwork do. When all 11 players work as a unit, magic can happen.

“The 1974 team was my first brush with ethnic diversity,” Long says. “That helped prepare me for joining the Peace Corps and meeting my wife-to-be from Mumbai in graduate school. As a provincial kid from a New Hampshire mill town, I wouldn’t have gotten very far without my exposure to the ethnic diversity that came from playing on that team.”