The Gift from Purple Shorts

In a very significant way you need to be a part of it to truly appreciate it, but it is so powerful and amazing that I will try my best to convey some of the craft to you. For those of you who have followed Lucky Mallonee’s soccer coaching career, you know the program has enjoyed seasons full of wins and sometimes titles as well as other campaigns that included losing records. There are certain constants, however, that permeate through all of his teams regardless of wins and losses.

My perspective is as a player in the mid-eighties, and primarily as an assistant coach on his staff from the fall of ’94 through the present. For the last nine years, what soccer historians will someday come to call ‘the Ryugo Era’ we’ve been extremely competitive. We’ve enjoyed a few regular season titles, lots of play-off games, and one championship game appearance. In some ways it was harder to see Lucky’s genius with these teams because we enjoyed an abundance of talent. That is not to say that Lucky did not mold it and wring out the best of it, because he did. Let’s just say it took a discerning eye to see it.

The gift I’m alluding to is the uncanny knack to get these kids to see beyond their own self-defined potential and then to reach it. As long as I’ve been a part of his teams, and I experienced this very directly as one of his players, his intuition for an individual’s true strengths and weaknesses is most perceptive. As only a true progressive teacher can, Lucky sets about leading these individuals to maximize their strengths, and then, what’s most incredible, he leads them to identify their weaknesses and master them.

On the soccer field, you can see this process at work with this year’s squad. We do not have an overabundance of soccer talent, but the goal tending from Jake Abrams ’12 has been spectacular, and the outstanding play of striker Andrew Patterson ’11 has been integral to the team’s success thus far. This season Lucky has taken a group of athletes who got humiliated in a scrimmage at the hands of an A-Conference opponent four weeks ago and melded them into a team that is now battling the best of our B-Conference rivals to a virtual standstill.

If you’re still reading this and saying to yourself ‘that’s all well and good’ but at the end of the day who really cares about high school soccer?’ then here’s the point. After living through this experience and receiving the gift of Lucky’s coaching, these kids go out into the ‘real world’ and apply the lessons learned. The results are a steady stream of emails, letters, and calls from high-achieving professionals in all walks of life, including Hollywood executives, college professors, attorneys, financial magnates, and doctors, all saying that they got to where they are in life by applying themselves the way Mr. Mal taught them.

At Park, we have lots of meetings, and we talk about many areas of the Park experience. Sometimes we talk about athletics, and we wrestle with questions like, ‘how can we express to the ‘outside world’ how special Park athletics truly are?’ Oh, and of course, everyone wants that accomplished with a tag line to match our society’s diminished attention span. Well, here’s one about the old man in purple shorts who roams Kelly Field in the fall, “He doesn’t just win games, he changes lives.”