Chapter 48: The Competitive Edge

Life is good.

I could only thank my lucky stars each and every night.

Was my charmed life perfect from that moment on? Of course not. Was life good, no matter what? Absolutely.

Kayla lived in the dorm her freshman year, even though she spent a lot of time at my apartment, and a lot of nights in my bed. Heather had the advantage of having a roommate who didn't spend a lot of time in her room. Spencer and I learned to cope with finding female products in our bathroom.

That fall, we went 13-0, leading up to the Georgetown tournament. We had a mishap that hurt us the second half of the season, when Sugar and Rico both got hurt in a collision during a corner kick. Rico elevated to head the ball when Sugar came out of his goal, leapt up, and grabbed it out of the air. Rico fell hard and blew out his knee. Sugar landed awkwardly on the ball, and his shoulder popped out of its joint. Just like that, our defensive unit was decimated. Our backup keeper was a freshman named Andy Smith, and he wasn't ready to take over the position. I reassigned myself to play in front of him, and a lot of our movement on the field suffered because of the shift. We lost the championship game on a shootout. For the balance of the regular season, we split. We won five, lost five, as Sugar and Rico could only watch from the sidelines. We won the SEC tournament, but lost in the NCAA in the second round.

We were all very disappointed with the results, of course. Pick, always looking to the future, was unconcerned.

"Nex' year, boys, we gonna scream through everybody, just you wait and see."

It was an attitude that didn't mollify Luke and Jeremy, our departing seniors.

There were bright spots to the season. Up until the injuries, we were ranked third in the nation, our highest ever. Lightspeed and Goldman joined me as first-team All-SEC selections, and I was also honored as a second-team All-American for my junior year.

For her sophomore year, Kayla and Heather once again roomed in the dorm, though Kayla spent even less time in her room than she did her freshman year. For all intents and purposes, she was our third roommate, a welcome addition to our apartment. We did all we could those two years to wear out the bedsprings.

True to his word, Pick guided our season my senior year to a much more successful conclusion. Everybody stayed healthy, and we made it all the way to the semifinals of the NCAA before falling. I would have liked to win it all, but making it that far felt like a real accomplishment.

Kayla chose Marketing as her major, vacillating between Early Childhood Development and her eventual choice before deciding she could help Jake and her father better run Lehigh Drugs. I also began to rely on her for promoting Porter Enterprises, even though we were continuing to experience phenomenal growth simply by word-of-mouth and localized advertising.

The summer after my graduation was our first year in the new Spring Lake Sports Complex. We moved as many of the community clinics as we could to Spring Lake, and I was able to let Theo and Trent take the lead on running everything there. I traveled a lot, from Maryland to Texas, Florida to Michigan, Kentucky to Wisconsin, doing coaching clinics, referee clinics, and getting to know as many of our attendees as I could.

With help from several people, I began transitioning Porter Enterprises from a summer venture into a full-time, year-round business. We expanded in a big way into the South. With the publicity surrounding my selection as a first-team All-American my senior year, Elena, Eddie Whitehead, and I were able to parlay that hoopla into wintertime clinics in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas. Rico and Jorge helped me tremendously in setting up several sites in Texas, and Lightspeed, Trent, and Eric worked on the Southeast. With Eric, Trent, and Jorge running the winter clinics in the South and Southeast, I was able to take advantage of an invitation that came my way after my senior season had ended.

Duane Olchick, one of my steadfast supporters from early on, had called me and invited me to come to Germany.

"I can't promise you anything, Sean," he warned me. "But you'll have tryouts available to you with just about any team here in the North you would like, and you can stay here with Francesca and me."

"That would be wonderful," I said. "How are Anik and Yuri?"

Duane chuckled. "Anik is in love. He is being stupid right now, but he will enjoy seeing you again. Yuri is just the same. In fact, he has been working with Regensberg, and he wants you to spend a week or so with him."

And so, I went to Germany late in September to work out with Duane, Yuri, and many of the best players in Europe.

It was awful. I enjoyed the time I spent with Duane and his family, and his brothers were both very generous with their time and their expertise. European players, however, were generally quite arrogant and rude. They had no respect for American skills, disparaging everything they heard about fussball in America.

I stuck with it, however, and even won over a few players from England, Germany, and France. I kept my cool, I watched and I learned, and I wrote down everything. I had a plan.

The American game was looked down upon, and rightly so. If Sean Porter was supposed to be one of the best, it was a poor group of scrubs indeed. But the pool of talent in the States was incredibly deep. If the U.S. soccer fraternity wanted to compete on the international stage, they needed somebody to come in and offer international-level training.

Oh, yes, I had a plan.

I spent four months in Europe. I took it all in, observed firsthand how the best teams gained their competitive edge, and how I could help craft the American future. When I got back home, just before Christmas, I was just about ready. It was a long-range plan, but I had already seen what could happen, seen it through what my clinics had already accomplished.

Porter-trained players were everywhere in the Midwest. Four of the top ten high school teams in Indiana had at least three clinic players in their starting lineup, and seven of the top ten in Illinois used at least two of my players. The top-ranked team in the state, my alma mater, was building a dynasty. Coach Neville incorporated as much of my system as he felt his players could handle, and he let my instructors take over the skills drills during the summer clinics we ran alongside him. Every player on both the varsity and junior varsity teams attended at least the school- sponsored clinics, and most of them were summer clinic members, also. As a result, Coach Neville's teams were never out of the top five ranked teams in the state, and were consistently ranked in the Top Twenty nationwide.

The system was proving itself out, and people were taking notice. Soccer Today did a big story on us, comparing the training offered by Porter Enterprises to the club programs run by the best European soccer organizations. They did a follow-up story six months later, listing the results Porter-trained teams were experiencing in junior travel team competition.

That series of articles kicked off another huge growth period. Kayla and some of her friends from Marketing and the Art Department worked on designing uniforms that would stand out, in green and red. I began a sponsorship program for recreational teams and travel teams of all ages. If a team had more than half their players enrolled in my clinics for at least one year, I would provide them with warm-up suits and two sets of uniforms for everybody, including the coaches and assistant coaches. They had the Porter lightning bolt logo on them, and the distinctive colors made the teams really stand out.

Of course, dressing the part was mere deception if the teams couldn't back it up on the field, and that's where the Porter-trained teams helped to build our reputation. Teams in red or green, with lightning bolts down the sides of the uniforms, began taking trophies all over the Midwest, the Southeast, and the South. Rec tournaments, travel team tournaments, three-on-three tournaments, middle school through high school competitions, even some adult leagues that were formed by parents and volunteer coaches, began to show up and take hardware home from nearly every competition they entered. Did they win every one? Of course not, but they played well enough, and finished high enough in the rankings so consistently, it became commonplace to see photos of teams dressed in Porter colors holding aloft trophies or ribbons. It was expensive for us to provide uniforms and sponsorships like that, but the publicity was worth it all.