Chris Pike grew up in Plymouth, England, playing soccer in a soccer-mad country. He’s been coaching the sport for years. But it didn’t take long for his daughter, Alex, to outgrow the scope of his expertise.
“I was a field player, and I was okay teaching her field stuff, but as a goalie, she needed a lot more than I could provide,” said Pike, who teaches special education at John Stark High School and coaches the girls’ JV soccer team. “That’s why we started sending her to specific goalie and soccer camps, and even when she does Futsal, she’ll do a Futsal training session and then a goalkeeper training session, and she does the same for outdoors as well.”
All that work, and plenty of talent, has led Alex, 12, from Weare to Kansas to Colombia, where she has been playing for the last week with the U.S. Youth Futsal U13 national team.
For the uninitiated, Futsal is five-on-five soccer played with a smaller, heavier ball. In New England, it’s usually played on basketball courts, although it can be played on larger courts and even outside. Unlike indoor soccer, Futsal doesn’t allow players to use the walls, which makes it a great skill-building game for soccer players.
But for Alex Pike, who will be an eighth-grader at Weare Middle School in the fall, Futsal is it’s own reward.
“I like Futsal more than soccer,” she said without hesitation, “because you get like 50 or 60 shots a game. So many more than in soccer.”
That answer falls right in line with Pike’s love for playing goalie.
“I like being able to see the whole field,” she said. “Field players can’t see it, they just see their spots, but when you’re a goalie you can see everything. You can see what’s going to happen next.”
Well, the good goalies can see what’s going to happen next, and there’s no doubt Pike is a good – working on great – goalie.
When she was only 8, Pike started traveling away from Weare looking for more soccer competition, which is how she discovered Futsal. She began training with Tom Bellen, the founder of FutsalNH, and Bruno Victal, the founder of Brazilian Arts Soccer. She would spend hours at indoor facilities in Derry and Nashua playing games for multiple teams.
In the summer of 2014, Pike was playing for two clubs at regional Futsal tournaments in Massachusetts. One of her teams won the tournament to qualify for a national competition in Overland Park, Kan., a hub for U.S. Futsal. Her team didn’t win a national crown, but the trip inspired Pike.
“The teams we were playing in that tournament play Futsal all year, so they were a lot more skilled than us,” Pike said. “But that just showed me how much better I could get at Futsal, and that’s what I wanted to do, get better.”
And that’s what she did. She began playing in the Eastern Premier Futsal League, which pits the top teams from Massachusetts against the best from New Hampshire. In February, she went to regional tryouts and earned a chance to try out for the national team this summer.
When Pike went back to Overland Park for those national tryouts in early July, she was better prepared for the level of competition. But she was still nervous, still eager to prove herself on a national stage, and it was still a massive challenge.
“I’m watching these adults just blasting the ball at these kids over and over and over again at the tryouts,” Chris Pike said. “We would leave the training session, drive back to the hotel and Alex would lay on the bed with ice packs all over her and sleep for two hours. I would wake her up, she would put her hair in a pony tail, put a new uniform on and we’d drive back there and she would do it again.
“As a couple days went on, she got more and more ice packs on her and she was pretty beat up by the third day. She had bruises all over her, she was wandering around like an old lady and she was limping, but she got up to the door for the training and she just put her foot down and walked in like nothing was wrong. You can’t ask any more of your kid than that.”
Turns out all the ice packs and bruises were worth it, although it took more time than Alex would have liked to find out.
“They said we were supposed to find out the day after the sessions ended, but I was at my friend’s house, and my dad was at summer school, so I hacked into his email,” Alex said with a giggle and with her dad listening.
Her hack job didn’t net any results, and she stayed up until midnight waiting for a phone call that never came. But the good news arrived the next day.
“When I found out, I was so excited,” she said. “I was just hugging my friend and calling all my family.”
Along with the good news came the realization that the Pikes had to come up with a couple thousand dollars in two weeks in order to fund the trip. The finances came together, with some help from a GoFundMe campaign organized by Alex’s mother, Erin. And Alex wanted to make sure everyone who contributed was thanked in this space.
Chris and Alex left for South America on Monday, and the trip has been, “the experience of a lifetime,” Chris said in an email.
Alex posted a shutout, and recorded an assist with a spot-on throw, in the half she played in a 7-2 win against Seleccion Itagui in the opening game Thursday. She played well again in a 12-3 win over Seleccion Intercolegiados on Friday. The final game is scheduled for today and the Pikes will travel home Monday.
They’ve also enjoyed the non-Futsal parts of their time in Colombia. They’ve gone hiking and to a water park. They’ve crammed into the metro and been protected from a group of pickpocketers by one of their guides. They’ve explored the sprawling city of Medellin where, “Futsal courts and soccer fields (are) on every corner, or so it appears,” Chris said. They even ventured into a section of the city they were told to avoid.
“It was here Ali showed her true side, sparking up conversations with street vendors as I watched in amazement,” the elder Pike said. “She purchased a bandana. A bracelet for her sister (Taylor) and a wallet for her sister’s boyfriend. Somehow with a smile, a few gestures and some really rough Spanish/English, she would walk away from each table with a new gift in hand as I sat and marveled. As Shakespeare said, ‘though she be but little, she is fierce.’ ”
(Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at 369-3341 or at tosullivan@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @timosullivan20.)