This summer, from July 25-August 8, The City University of New York Athletic Conference’s (CUNYAC) men’s soccer team will head over to South Africa to play a tournament. For many players, it’ll be a taste of what it’s like to be a superstar athlete, minus the exorbitant paycheck.
What’s being called the Goodwill Tour is part cultural exchange, part athletics. Each year a different CUNYAC athletic team, made up of members from all 18 CUNY colleges, heads overseas to compete while gaining exposure to a foreign country, its people and cultures. But this is the first international trip for the soccer team, and Kenichi Yatsuhashi is a co-coach for the CUNYAC team because BMCC is ranked number one of all the competing CUNY community colleges. The other co-coach is Osborn Carter from City College.
Kenichi Yatsuhashi–or Kenni, as he prefers to be called–landed his job as BMCC’s soccer coach a week before the first game of the 2001 season. As fate would have it, the acting coach was stuck in Peru with passport problems. Kenni came through in his place and stayed on.
Before coming to BMCC, Kenichi worked for the New York State Soccer Association, which sent him to work at several soccer training camps that recruit professionals.
“I was coaching coaches and the New York State Select Team,” Kenni explains. “They send players to the U.S National team, so I was coaching the best players in the state.”
Growing up an athlete in Japan, where baseball is the most popular sport, Kenni knew he’d have to leave the country for a shot at playing soccer professionally.
“Baseball was too boring for me,” he explains. “There was too much standing around. I needed a sport with action.”
There was also the problem of there being no professional soccer teams in Japan at that time. So, at age 17, Kenni moved to Brazil, where he trained with the Youth Academy. At age 20, he went on to play Division II. Despite his passion for the sport, Kenni left Brazil and moved to New York, where he made the decision to stop pursuing a career as a professional soccer player.
It’s his coaching experience, his ease in foreign settings, and his obvious dedication to the students that give the CUNY community confidence that Kenni will serve his role well as 2006 CUNYAC soccer co-coach for the summer Goodwill Tour in South Africa.
South African Goodwill Tour
Nearly four years ago, a team representing CUNYAC men’s basketball teams went to the Dominican Republic. In 2004, the women’s basketball team traveled to Ecuador, and last summer, the women’s volleyball team flew over to Argentina.
“We’ll have less time to play and practice than see the country,” Kenni says about the trip to South Africa, a country with which he’s unfamiliar but he knows is one that embraces all things soccer. “The students and I are very excited about holding clinics for the locals.”
The tournament the CUNYAC team will take part in starts only a few weeks after The World Cup, which will be hosted in Germany this summer. Kenni reflects on the cultural mission of the Goodwill Tour when he looks at the politics behind The World Cup itself:
“Do you remember the guy on the Iranian team, who kicked the goal that caused the U.S to lose?” he asks. “Well, he came and played for one of the Major League Soccer franchise teams for a season. He eventually went back to his country, but the move showed great sportsmanship and possibilities of peaceful resolutions beyond the soccer field.”
Many cultural critics have analyzed the politics behind soccer, the great international sport, but for Kenni, the politics are minimal in comparison with the simple love of the game.
“The business of soccer is beginning to dominate the sport in an alarming way, however,” Kenni adds. “It’s becoming more about career goals than any sense of teamwork or even national pride. It can be about both, I suppose, but I’m watching it becoming more and more about the money.”
Kenni may be right. But the bright side of that is there’s a good chance that the U.S will host the World Cup again soon, mainly because no World Cup series in history has made nearly as much money as the one held in our great city.
