CU Sports Camps a Kick With Local Youngsters

A soccer ball soars through the air and into the goal. "Excellent," yells the coach as the player hustles to the back of the line. The athlete adjusts his cap and wipes the sweat off his face. He is eight years old.

With most Columbia athletes gone for the summer, Baker Field recently has been dominated by a different age group. These children, ages 6-17, are participating in Columbia's NYC Soccer Academy and two baseball camps, Paul Fernandes's Baseball Camp and Mikio Aoki's Stealing Home Baseball Camp.

What's unique about the soccer camp is that young players have the opportunity to learn from players and coaches on Columbia's varsity soccer teams. Ken Torrey, the chairman of Columbia's physical education department, Dieter Ficken, Columbia's men's soccer coach, and Kevin McCarthy, Columbia's women's soccer coach, started the camp and now serve as the camp's directors.

Torrey, Ficken, and McCarthy wanted to provide a place for New York City kids to play and learn.

"The kids have no place to play," Ficken said. "The adults were taking their fields in Central Park. ... Soccer is now relegated to Randall's Island Sports Foundation park, which is between Queens and Manhattan. There are lots of soccer fields, but they're very difficult to get to."

As a result, Columbia's soccer camp has achieved growing popularity.

The day, which goes from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon with an hour-long lunch break, consists of warm-up exercises, practice drills, and scrimmage games.

In one drill, called Wall Ball, one player kicks the ball against a wall and then the next player has to try to kick it back against the wall before the ball stops rolling. In another, players lie on their backs and practice kicking the ball with their foot straight up in the air. "If you're good, you can practice this in your bathtub," McCarthy yelled at one point to the group of prone players.

The six-hour day can be long for some children, especially in the 90-degree heat. When they're playing, however, the kids hardly notice.

Jenny McPheely, the mother of 12-year-old camper Jackson Goodman, called her son's experience "fabulous."

"It was boiling hot and he was fainting every day when he came home, but he couldn't get enough of it," McPheely said. "I asked him if he would like camp if it ended at lunch time and would that be better in this heat, and he said, 'No, it wouldn't be enough soccer.'"

Even during their lunch break on a recent sweltering day, the campers could not sit still; they ran outside after about ten minutes and started their own pick-up soccer games.

Despite this enthusiasm, with the temperature in the upper 90s every day last week, the medical staff had to work hard to keep kids from overheating. "We try to keep them hydrated and keep them out of the sun as best we can, make sure they wear sunscreen and try to keep the sunburn down," said athletic trainer Gene Schafer.

All three sports camps have achieved a strong reputation, but it took a while for the camps to achieve their success.

"When I first arrived here, the attitude was kind of like, well, it's going to be tough in the city of New York to conduct successful summer camps," said John Reeves, Columbia's athletics director. "Some of [those reasons] have to do with economics, and some of them have to do with, at that time, perceived safety issues. I was very determined to expose that as a myth."

The NYC Soccer Academy, which was recently chosen by New York magazine as one of the best soccer camps in the city, began with less than 50 campers and has now grown to include more than 150--a notable accomplishment for a camp that does not advertise.

The baseball camps had rocky starts as well. When Fernandes began his camp in 1977, it had 17 campers. "We were almost thinking that maybe there really isn't this need that we thought existed, so we weren't going to run it," said Fernandes, the camp's associate director. "And then someone had said to us, 'Well, the only way you can get something like this started is to begin with the size group that you have and then see if people have a good experience.' Word of mouth--they'll tell a friend, they'll tell a parent, that sort of thing. And that's exactly what happened."

One week last year the camp almost reached its limit of 75 campers.

In all three camps, boys and girls play together--although the boys greatly outnumber the girls. "They fit right in," said Fernandes of the female campers. "If they put their cap on and they put their hair under their cap, you don't even know that it's a different sex that's involved in the activity."

Anne Bradley, who attends Fernandes's baseball camps and is the only ten-year-old girl in her age group, said that being the only girl doesn't matter and that she's learned from the boys on her team. "It's all right," she said. "The camp is fun, and you get to learn. Kids have never batted to me and pitched to me, and I've learned how to hit from them."

Even at the high school level, girls enjoy playing among the guys. Anna Cho, a 17-year-old soccer player from Kenfield, California, would rather play with the opposite sex. "I like [playing with the guys] a lot better than playing with the girls," Cho said. "It's just faster and a higher level of play."

For students like Cho, who may be interested in attending Columbia, the summer sports camps are a way for Columbia to show off its facilities to potential applicants.

"[The camps] expose area youngsters to the Columbia University environment and all that it has to offer," Reeves said. "My guess is that a lot of kids and their parents want to see Columbia in a slightly different light than they might perceive otherwise--as this big ivory tower institution. [They can see Columbia] as a real place where real exciting things happen. Then of course, hopefully, when it comes to choosing a college, some of the local people look a little bit closer at Columbia because they've had ... a good experience at our camp."

But sports--not marketing--are the primary focus of the camps' instructors. One of the reasons for the soccer camp's success is the shared teaching philosophy of Ficken and McCarthy. "The game is the teacher," Ficken said. "We don't stop and have tons of drills so that at any given time only one boy or girl is actually touching the ball and the others are standing in line. ... The children are always playing and learning to make decisions. ... I've never believed a drill can teach a child how to play a sport effectively. To me, it seems like teaching how to drive by the driving manual."

In addition, the campers get a lot of mentoring from the college-age coaches. "We combine the expertise of the experienced coach with the enthusiasm of the younger players who are also great role models for the boys and girls at camp," said McCarthy.

There are five weeks of soccer camp and five weeks of the two baseball camps combined. Each week is a different group of kids, but some children decide to participate in more than one week. The soccer academy just ended its second week last Friday, and it will resume on August 4.