It’s a perfect sunny and clear Saturday, and on the soccer field at Allan Hancock College, a group of teenage girls is getting their kicks in.
They’re auditioning for the premier under-18 girls’ soccer club in the region: the Katana, which is looking to reload by recruiting the top high school talent available on the Central Coast. Running the girls through drills is coach and founder Gonzalo Garcia, known affectionately as “Gonzo.”
June means it’s graduation time for most of Garcia’s players, whom he’s had the pleasure of coaching for more than five years. He’s watched the girls grow up and considers them all to be family.
“It’s going to be hard to see them go,” Garcia said. “You see teams that just fall apart because of internal relationships, you see them chewing on each other on the field, and we just don’t create that environment. The girls play for each other, not for me, and they work really hard together.”
After one last tournament later this month, the girls in the club’s core group are going their separate ways. As a coach who stresses academics over athletics, Garcia is as proud as any father would be that most of them are moving on to four-year colleges.
“There’s certain prerequisites that I have for my club,” Garcia said. “I want smart players, so they’ve got to have good grades. They’ve got to have standards that they adhere to, because I’m looking for excellence. I don’t just take anybody.”
His current group boasts a bumper crop of students with 4.0 grade-point-averages, including a class valedictorian and a homecoming queen. But their success hasn’t been limited to the classroom. In fact, the club is one of the most successful girls’ soccer programs in the state.
Over the past seven years together, the Katana players have amassed a record of 157-70-33. That span includes 19 first-place finishes and six second-place finishes.
The team made it to the Cal South Nationals the past two years, and advanced to the Round of 16 in 2009, the first time a local club team had ever accomplished such a feat.
“For a small group, we just don’t have the depth of player pool,” Garcia said. “Down there, there’s thousands of players at that quality. Here, there might be 30 or 40 players split between two clubs. For us to get to the Round of 16 just says what kind of quality these kids really are. It’s pretty amazing, actually.”
One of the Katana’s returning members is forward Jamie Council. The 17-year-old from Atascadero High School is the club’s leading scorer. She came to the Katana in May of last year after her old club, the Arroyo Grande Condors, folded.
With a mixture of speed, agility, and a powerful leg, Council is a surefire Division-I prospect, according to Garcia. Participating in Nationals with the Katana, Council said, has helped afford her more opportunities playing soccer beyond high school.
“I’ve just been playing with silver elite teams and winning tournaments, but [playing with the Katana] is more about the experience,” Council said. “Also, I’ve been getting a lot of exposure to colleges, and, as a junior, that’s really on my mind right now.”
Council, who’s played soccer competitively since she was 7, said her experience playing for Garcia has taught her a lot about the sport—and life in general.
“Some teams are constantly yelling at each other. On our team, if somebody makes a mistake, the rest of us will say, ‘Oh, you’ll get it next time’ and are really encouraging,” Council said. “[Coach Garcia] doesn’t just look at the player talent on the field, but he looks at how they work with other people. He looks for the room to grow, not how good they are now. He really emphasizes not just soccer, but academics, which is really important because you’re a student-athlete first, not an athlete-student.”
Another returning player, midfielder/forward Ruby Navarro, has dreamed of playing professional soccer since she was 3. The 17-year-old junior from Nipomo High School hopes to attend UCLA, UC-Santa Barbara, or UC-San Diego. No stranger to club play, Navarro said she’s learned and progressed under Garcia, and that her experience playing at a higher level of competition on the Katana has been rewarding.
“It’s not like any other team. We’re like a family,” Navarro said. “Everybody likes everybody, and we all get along.”
Garcia is happy to provide the opportunity, especially for those players who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to play for a club. That’s why the Katana, unlike other club teams, doesn’t charge players for the privilege, instead relying on donations and fundraisers to stay in the game.
The 51-year-old Garcia, whose family came from Chile, said he started the club because he wants to give back to the game and the community.
“I’m sharing my parents’ vision for what America stands for,” Garcia said. “I’ve had a great opportunity, and I learned a lot about life from playing the game, so that’s what I try to bring to my players: that sense of returning back to the community.”
Garcia’s wife, Margaret, handles managerial duties and brother Al, the Hancock men’s coach and Santa Maria High School boys coach, helps out with training.
One of the team’s mottos is “Technical plus Tactical,” a phrase describing the Katana’s aggressive attack-from-all-angles playing style.
“Gonzo” began the Katana as an under-10 recreational team. From there, he selected a team of Santa Maria Valley All-Stars and added players who came to him through word of mouth from Santa Ynez, Lompoc, Nipomo, and Atascadero.
The team’s nickname came from the type of sword wielded by samurais, which Garcia said represents the gradual forging process required to create a strong weapon.
“Every practice, we’re folding our steel, and every game we played and lost was part of the pounding process of building something remarkable and beautiful and efficient,” Garcia said. “That was our philosophy in building this team.”
Success didn’t come right away. In Garcia’s first season, the club finished 12-11, but the team stayed together and improved each year, at one point winning six tournaments in a row.
The tournament experiences helped the girls bond together, Garcia said. After this season wraps up, the remaining Katana members are going to miss the camaraderie.
“Nationals was just great, and we finally started to all come together, and now they’re going away,” Council said of the graduates. “I’m bummed that we’re going to lose all of them, but they’re going to go off to college and I’m sure they’ll all do well.”
The club, which plays from February to November, will be competing with another local team, Madrid Premier, to complete its revamped 20-player roster. That leaves the future of the club up in the air, Garcia said. If he can recruit enough quality players to field a team at a competitive level, he’ll continue to run the Katana. Otherwise, the team will have to go on hiatus.
Garcia hopes—for the girls’ sake and his—that such a move won’t be necessary.
“They’re great kids. They’re a blast,” he said. “It’s the fountain of youth. I get out there and scrimmage with them, and I’m the biggest kid on the team. I firmly believe if it’s not fun for me, they’re not going to have fun.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas is the biggest kid in the office. Contact him at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 11-18, 2009.