Luc Marchessault
A man is about to kick a soccer ball while two younger children are also doing footwork with a soccer ball.
Coach Ashton Moksouphanh leads his 13U team at practice: ‘I treat them all like my kids.’
Ashton Moksouphanh doesn’t believe in yelling, so while his instructions are direct and sometimes critical, he doesn’t bellow or bark so much as he insists. On a rare bright and warm April evening at Reindahl Park, the boys who play on the Capital East Soccer Club’s 13U team he coaches are running a drill that’s designed to get them to make decisions about what they’re going to do with the ball before they receive a pass from a teammate.
“Let’s pick up the pace,” he tells them. “Pass the ball how you want to receive it. Pay attention to the details, guys.”
It’s a complicated exercise and several players are frustrated when they fail to pick it up immediately. But after a few reps, the ball starts moving faster. Passes are a little crisper, more precise, and the players begin to move in rhythm.
“Our next step is to teach them that every pass has to mean something,” Moksouphanh says as the team takes a water break. “If you pass it to your teammate’s right, that means you want them to go right. Passing is a language, so they have to learn how to communicate that way.”
It seems like a pretty advanced notion for a bunch of tweens to grasp, but this team is accomplished. They finished in first place in the Wisconsin Youth Soccer Association’s First League last fall and moved up to the Premier League this spring, competing against clubs from around the state. And they’re fresh off a tournament championship in the Dells late last month.
Six years ago, Moksouphanh was coaching a tee-ball team made up of Sandburg Elementary kindergartners when his wife registered their son, Talon, for an MSCR soccer league. That team also needed a coach, and he agreed. As the boys got older, more kids from Sandburg (and eventually other schools) joined, fell in love with the sport, and worked to get better. The team moved from the recreational MSCR league to the more competitive Capital East club and continued to grow, with the core group staying together.
“The kids just keep coming, more and more, I think just because they feel comfortable with me,” he says. “I treat them all like my kids. I’ll run through the wall for them and they know that. They enjoy each others’ company and they enjoy the coaching.”
Moksouphanh describes a lifelong love of sports that took root as a young child. A Laotian refugee, he arrived as a 10-year-old in Stockton, California, in the 1980s.
“I didn’t speak any English,” he says. “But by the time I was 12, I created a football program with all my friends in the neighborhood. We played against different schools and I was always the guy who made sure we had enough players and stuff.”
He confesses to being a “football and basketball guy” before soccer, but he’s drawn to the strategizing and teaching that come with coaching any sport and has worked with former UW-Madison men’s soccer coach Jim Launder to earn several youth coaching licenses from the U.S. Soccer Federation.
“I played soccer growing up because that’s what we had in the refugee camp. No shoes, just flip-flops or barefoot. We just showed up and played, grown-ups and kids,” says Moksouphanh. “So soccer has always been a part of my life. But when my son started playing, I started reading books.”
Capital East’s grassroots, neighborhood teams are not the norm in competitive youth soccer. The large, prestigious clubs around the state — and country — are notorious for their high price tags, politics and cutthroat tryouts. Even more rare is the racial and cultural diversity on Moksouphanh’s team, which includes kids with Asian, African and Latino backgrounds. U.S. Soccer executives have long identified the sport’s reputation for being an exclusive community of white, suburban and privileged kids as a major problem.
Capital East director Eric Bertun, who has been involved in Madison soccer at nearly every level for decades, tipped me off about Moksouphanh’s work over the winter. In many ways, the team exemplifies the club’s mission.
“There’s a strong focus on being a community club, finding a place for everyone that wants to play while keeping the costs contained,” Bertun says.
Moksouphanh didn’t have to buy into that mission. He was living it while organizing his neighborhood football team in Stockton. He has always understood that the most important aspect of building a team is bringing people together, not excluding them.
“Our kids come from all different backgrounds, but they love soccer and the structure of the team,” he says. “Parents come to me and we talk about price and I tell them, ‘Hey, we can work something out.’ Maybe we offer a scholarship or we can do some fundraising to help them out.”
Instead of looking to Europe or South America, maybe those trying to solve American soccer’s diversity problems should head to Reindahl Park.
