Soccer club scoring generations of players

Participating in sports as a kid has a way of shaping a child’s life and sticking with them, even through to adulthood. Sometimes, those same sports can bring them back as coaches, too. 

Sean McBride, a coach for the Homewood Soccer Club and Homewood High School, has decades of experience both on and off the field.

“Growing up in Scotland, [soccer] is all the kids did,” he said. “You started playing with your school teams, and then your youth clubs, and if you’re lucky enough you start getting involved with the pro teams.”

McBride was one of the lucky ones to turn professional, and since then, he has passed on his passion for soccer to the younger generations of Homewood by coaching for the past 20 years.

Originally an offshoot of the Parks and Recreation Department, the Homewood Soccer Club started growing when department members convinced former coach/director David Putman that soccer should become its own program in 2007. Around that time, the Homewood Soccer Club found its home along Lakeshore Drive after more than 60 families attended a Feb. 14 city council meeting in support of the program. Putman refers to that meeting as “The Battle of Valentine’s Day.”

The Homewood Soccer Club, now a state corporation, has continued to grow ever since by keeping the cost of the program low and the passion for the sport high.

“The playing level has gotten better and better each year, and that comes from the coaches,” McBride said. “I think the fact that there’s a lot of coaches who have been at the club for multiple years is helpful.”

It just so happens that some of his fellow coaches have really been with Homewood Soccer since they played for the club when they were younger, he said. 

“I started playing in the Patriot program, the real little kids,” said Julian Kersh, one of four coaches who previously played in the club and now coaches the younger athletes. Kersh, along with coaches Ian Cavanaugh, Tevin Fowler and Rob Dominguez, competed for the Homewood Soccer Club when it was still run by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. 

Now, Kersh is back with some of his former teammates, and he also helps coach the boys high school team, whose success is affiliated with the club program. 

“That’s the rewarding thing, is seeing kids like Julian starting the program and graduating high school and coming back,” McBride said. “It makes you feel like you’ve done something right, to see how they’ve grown into the men that they are and see the respect they have from these kids.”

Some of the boys that Kersh and McBride coach on the high school team also started their soccer career at the Homewood Soccer Club.

“You develop a relationship with these kids, and you want them to be successful,” Kersh said of his club and high school athletes. “It’s really nice to see kids … see them come from 10, 11 years old, to come to the JV team and the varsity team.”

Because the newest generation of soccer coaches in the club is close in age to its players, McBride said they have the opportunity to create a bond with them and instill the respect, discipline and a balanced student-athlete lifestyle they were taught, while keeping it fun.

“They have this love of the sport, and they’re going to have it until they’re my age, and past it,” McBride said. “You have that bond with them; they know they can always come back.”

Although the role Kersh and some of his fellow coaches have in the program has flipped, he still tries to pass on the love of the sport he acquired during practices and keep the fun alive during games.

“You can’t make it too strict because their passion is still budding, and you don’t want to step on that,” he said. He also acknowledges that he is now a mentor-figure and role model in his players’ lives, something that McBride was once, and still is, for him. 

“There’s just a unique sort of bond [in team sports],” Kersh said. “I always thought, if I could be the Sean McBride for someone else as he was to me, then I think it would be remarkably fulfilling.”