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An interaction more than two decades ago between a soccer ref and soccer enthusiast Franklin Herrera was the catalyst for a friendship between Franklin and fellow soccer enthusiast Noe Garcia that resulted in Redwood City kids having the opportunity to play competitive club soccer even if their parents couldn’t afford the hefty fees.
That interaction took place in 2002 at Redwood City’s Red Morton Park during a soccer game between Franklin and Noe’s 8-year-old sons’ recreational soccer teams. (Franklin and Noe were each coaching their son’s team.) Noe’s son committed a foul and the ref scolded him sternly. Franklin intervened, telling the ref that, while the foul needed to be addressed, he could have made his point without being quite so harsh.
Noe was astounded by what he’d heard. “Frank’s team was losing. But I could see then that Frank wasn’t about winning. For him, it was about the kids, the community, the team, everything except him.”
At the time, Noe had been thinking about starting a more competitive team for his son, and Franklin, who clearly knew something about coaching kids’ soccer, seemed like an ideal partner. Noe floated the idea by Franklin, Franklin accepted his offer, and the pair, working under the auspices of Redwood City’s Juventus Sport Club, launched one of Redwood City’s first youth club soccer teams. What Noe didn’t know at that time was that Franklin’s gentle giant demeanor and contagious conviviality made him an ace recruiter who thought nothing of approaching kids he didn’t know and suggesting that they try playing soccer.
“He sees a kid on a bike or a kid hanging around the park and he’ll say, ‘Hey, come play soccer’,” says Anna Laura Carlos, a Redwood City mom who has five kids who played soccer under Franklin’s watch.
Thanks to Franklin’s success wooing kids onto the field, the Juventus Sport Club added five new youth soccer teams to its roster by the end of Franklin and Noe’s first coaching season.
Franklin and Noe continued coaching their sons’ team and overseeing the Juventus youth program until 2013 when their sons aged out of youth soccer and went off to college. At that point Franklin focused on creating club soccer teams for young adults, while Noe decided to take a break from soccer.
Seeing dollar signs
Fast forward to 2021. Covid was winding down and kids in Redwood City were just getting back to organized sports. This time it was Franklin who approached Noe. Franklin was eager to get back to working with kids and knew that Noe had a daughter who was an avid soccer player. Perhaps he and Noe could again work together and start a club team for her.
By that time, several youth club soccer teams had sprung up in Redwood City, and Noe’s daughter easily could have played with one of them. But Noe, like Franklin, had grown disillusioned with how the local youth club soccer scene was playing out. “The clubs were seeing dollar signs instead of creating opportunities for kids to play soccer,” Noe says. (This apparently was a national trend.) So Franklin and Noe decided to start their own youth club soccer program and to do it their way.
In three years, JASA, the youth program Franklin and Noe founded, grew to include 43 teams for kids ages 5 to 18. About 70 percent of their players were Latinx. Many lived in North Fair Oaks, a few lived in shelters.
“A lot of these kids had no front yard. They had no backyard. We’d tell the parents, ‘Bring your kid out here and let this soccer field be their backyard’,” Noe says.
JASA’s youth program didn’t advertise or have a flashy Web site or a five-year plan. Instead, it relied on what Franklin refers to as “organic growth” that started with the team, not the club.
JASA coaches were compensated but minimally. Because most jobs were done by parents, clubs’ fees–$300 to $500 per child per season–were less than half what club teams charged with far bigger staffs. (Franklin and Noe didn’t take a salary.) If a family couldn’t afford the fees, they chatted privately with Franklin–the designated parent liaison–to figure out how the family could pay less and volunteer more. If that wasn’t an option, Franklin looked for a community sponsor–a family or business willing to help out.
As Anna sees it, “Money is not the important thing for Franklin. It’s about building a community.”
JASA never turned down players due to lack of skill. Rather, prospective players attended practice for two weeks to see what they thought. If they decided they wanted to play, they were placed on a team based on their age and skill level. If a team qualified for an out-of-town tournament, the team raised funds so no players were left behind.
Michael Maylan, another Redwood City youth soccer icon who worked with Franklin and Noe in their early days of coaching, describes the twosome this way: “These two fellas have given years and years of their lives to make sure the youth of Redwood City have a place to be, have a purpose, and have an extended family that will be there to support them in troubled times…times when their own families sometimes cannot give them the support they need. I’ve known both coaches to allow players to stay with them while they work out troubles at home. I have seen players grow from young boys to grown men with purpose in their lives under the tutelage of Noe and Frank.”
Rooted in soccer
Growing up in El Salvador, Franklin played soccer every chance he could get. Then, when he was 16, he reluctantly moved to the U.S. to live with his father who was working as a dishwasher in Redwood City. They lived in a studio apartment on Broadway which they shared with four other people.
One day soon after he’d moved here Franklin was dribbling a soccer ball on a field near his apartment when he was approached by a soccer coach who, after observing Franklin, asked him if he’d like to join his team. When Franklin said that he would, the coach suggested they go to Franklin’s apartment to ask his dad if he’d be willing to pay the team fees. Franklin’s father’s response was a resounding “no.”
“My father said he’d come to this country to work, not to pay for me to play soccer,” Franklin recalls. Hearing that, the coach put his arm on Franklin’s shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry, Frank. I’ll take care of you’.’” Franklin played on his team for the next three years and never paid a penny.
Noe’s parents immigrated to Redwood City from Mexico. His mom was a housecleaner and his dad was a gardener. Growing up in Redwood City in the 90s, Noe was passionate about soccer, but his parents, focused on making sure they could provide their kids with food on the table and a roof over their heads, had neither the money nor the interest in enrolling their kids in organized sports. Noe, looking for a sense of belonging, joined a gang. He managed to stay out of trouble and graduated from high school. He also became a father at seventeen. “The minute I saw my daughter, I knew I wanted to give her a different kind of childhood than I’d had,” Noe says. Coaching all four of his kids’ soccer teams is how he made that happen.
Derailed but not daunted
A story about Franklin and Noe wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Franklin’s bout with dermatomyositis, a rare, chronic autoimmune disease that, at its worst, resulted in Franklin having such severe muscle weakness that he couldn’t walk, stand, or even swallow.
The severity of Franklin’s illness became apparent in 2013 when Franklin and Noe were taking their sons’ team to the Dallas Cup, one of the country’s premier youth soccer tournaments. It was a particularly noteworthy event because both of their sons were about to go off to college. Prior to the tournament, Franklin hadn’t been feeling himself–he was unable to kick a soccer ball, he couldn’t jump, his legs cramped–but given all the energy that he’d put into coaching his team and then handling all the logistics to make the trip possible, he decided to go anyway. He spent much of that trip in the emergency room.
A few weeks and several fruitless doctors’ visits later, Franklin was admitted to UCSF Medical Center and then, after a month, was transferred to San Francisco’s St. Francis Memorial Hospital. It was weeks before he was able to take his first step and, even then, required assistance from machines and lifts.
Noe visited Franklin in the hospital two or three times a week. What Noe says he told Franklin, relayed in a heart-rending video Franklin’s wife Kristy and his son Alexander made about Franklin’s recovery, was that Franklin needed to give himself the same kind of encouragement he gave his players: “You’ve got to fight as hard as you can.”
What Franklin didn’t know at the time was how much Noe was wrestling with his own issues: his business was in decline, he was losing his house, and he was going through a divorce. “I got strength from Franklin,” Noe says. “My personal problems were zero compared to what my friend was going through. Franklin was ready to give up, throw in the towel. It gave me strength to be the strong person in front of him, even though, inside, I could hardly function.”
It was an arduous and heroic battle, but four months after being admitted to Saint Francis, Franklin temporarily left his walker at the door and exited from the hospital on his own two feet.
The winds of change
A year after he was released from the hospital, Franklin returned to his job as a paraprofessional for kids with special needs at Redwood City’s Kennedy Middle School. Several years later, when he approached Noe about starting a club team for Noe’s daughter, lingering symptoms of Franklin’s illness, including reduced strength in his hips and shoulders and poor balance, made him unable to return to coaching.
Instead, Franklin spent at least four hours a day, six days a week walking the fields at Red Morton Park where JASA’s teams practiced. He’d chat with players. (Noe contends that Franklin knew the names of each of the 600 kids on JASA’s roster; Franklin denies this.) He resolved issues that arose between kids and coaches, coaches and parents, even parents and kids. (Anna, the mom mentioned earlier, says that Franklin has been like a second father to her kids.) And he informally assumed multiple positions–director of coaching, director of the girls’ program, director of the boys’ program, field coordinator, equipment manager, custodian–that other club teams typically hire people to do.
Redwood City’s youth soccer landscape changed yet again on July 15th when JASA and Juventus, the club Franklin and Noe’s teams had been affiliated with the first time they coached together, merged to become the JSC Soccer Club.
The merger happened in part because Franklin and Noe were victims of their own success. Being responsible for hundreds of kids on dozens of teams, while holding down full-time jobs–they said they’d no longer enjoy the work if they got paid–made it impossible for them to give the administrative aspects of their youth program the attention it required.
JSC has hired staff to do some of the jobs that once were done by volunteers. As a result, families pay more than in the past, though Franklin says it’s still less than other clubs charge. Franklin’s official title is community liaison. He continues to walk Red Morton’s fields six days a week and he insists that he will continue to fight to ensure that every kid who wants to play soccer will play, regardless of their ability to pay.
Noe, meanwhile, is the assistant coach for his daughter’s soccer team and the coach for his grandson’s team and has two more grandkids who he’ll start coaching as soon as they’re old enough to dribble a soccer ball.
Noe didn’t vote for the merger, but, now that it happened, he’s accepted it. “Soccer’s is my therapy, my medicine. I’ll stick with it no matter what.”
