Cultural exchange

The British Invasion came to Pittsburg this week for the British Soccer Camp.

Garry Hancock (Glasgow, Scotland) and Simon Cooper (Birmingham, England) have been instructing local children on the finer points of soccer and variations in the English language all week at the PSU soccer fields behind Al Ortolani Field.

“Awesome,” Hancock said on Thursday of the camp so far. “The kids down here are great. The people that have been working with us with the Parks and Rec, they’ve been awesome, you know, making sure all the kids are alright from water to sunscreen. Everybody’s been very welcome and very friendly around here, you know, you can’t ask for any more. We bounce around from place to place each week, so every week you call a new place home.”

“Camp’s been amazing,” Cooper said. “The enthusiasm of the kids has been really good considering the heat. It’s harder for me than it is for them. They’ve actually, like, gone on with it. We often get water breaks just to refuel but they’ve maintained their enthusiasm for the whole three hours. You don’t often get that but the kids around here must be eating something because they’ve got all that energy.”

Speaking of heat, temperatures in the 90s might be more of a shock to Hancock and Cooper than anything culturally in Southeast Kansas.

“It’s cold. It’s wet,” Hancock said of Glasgow. “Back home, it’s maybe 55, 60 degrees. It’s like 110 here and heat index of who knows what. The second I step out, I usually end up the same color as my shirt (red) by the end of the week, my nose peels, but I love it.”

“It’s always raining in England — always, always raining,” Cooper said. “Basically, right now, it’s meant to be the middle of the summer but they’re actually having floods. That says all you need to know about England. My mom’s been sending me pictures over and it’s literally downpouring. It hasn’t stopped raining for like three weeks.”

Hancock and Cooper are employed by Challenger Sports, a Lenexa-based company billing itself as “the total soccer company” and sponsor of the British Soccer Camp.

“This is four years I’ve been doing this, so this is pretty much my life now and I can’t remember the last time I slept in my own bed,” Hancock said. “I love it, I’m still young.”

“This year, I came out in June and I’m going home in November,” Cooper said. “I’ll get a nice sun tan and get out of England for a little bit. I enjoy my job. I really wouldn’t like sitting in an office, so I get to get out and be active.”

Cooper, in his second year working for Challenger, named Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska as states he’s been for camps this summer.

“I’ve seen loads of different towns,” Cooper said. “Believe it or not, (Pittsburg) is actually one of the bigger towns I’ve coached. It’s nice to see the university. It’s a beautiful place.”

Cooper later mentioned the successful American football team known simply as the Pittsburg State Gorillas.

Hancock, meanwhile, said that he likes the wide open spaces of America, especially traveling on highways like Interstate 35.

Do not let his youthful facade trick you, the 22-year-old Hancock has been playing soccer for a long time and he’s developed into a veteran coach.

“I’ve been coaching professionally for seven years back home,” Hancock said. “I’ve been out here in the states doing it for four.

“I got drafted (into coaching) while I was still playing. It’s part of the youth academies back home because everyone plays. It’s not like over here, you know, where you go to college then you play professionally. You get picked out when you’re 10 years old back home. You start getting paid to play professionally and then that’s your life. It’s like school takes a backseat, soccer comes first.

“I fell into it (coaching) and it became a passion. I coach an academy team. My kids are 15 years old, so that’s right where I was when I started (coaching). We’ve been Scottish champions two years and running. I love it. I can’t get enough of it. I have the same passion, maybe even more, for coaching as I do for playing.”

Hancock said that he first played soccer when he was 2 or 3 years old, about the same age as the youngest kids attending the British Soccer Camp.

The less experienced Cooper draws coaching the younger children and the veteran Hancock instructs the older children.

Today will be the last camp day (camp starts at 9 a.m. and ends at 12 Noon) and plans have already been made to have some fun on a Friday.

“It’s going to be fun,” Cooper said. “We’ve organized a big water fight. What we normally do is that we stop about 30 minutes early and we like hand out certificates and we sign soccer balls, shirts and sometimes I’ve even signed soccer cleats. Then, we get into a water fight. We have big water guns.

“Normally, we (Cooper and Hancock) get soaked at the start but then we normally steal their water guns and attack them back. Their parents don’t mind because we tell them to bring a towel and they’ll appreciate it in this weather. I wish I had some water now to soak myself.”

Then, it’s onward and forward to the next stop on the road for Cooper and Hancock, their next week coaching soccer and seeing America.

“Host families put us up every week, so we don’t know the people, they don’t know us and still I’m overwhelmed by the hospitality when I come into a town,” Hancock said. “They’re like, ‘We’ll let you stay at our house. We’ll feed you. We’ll give you a bed. We’ll show you around town and we’ll do stuff with you.’ I don’t know if it would happen at home and I think that’s one of the reasons I love America.”

And Now for Something Completely Different
Covering the British Soccer Camp on Thursday, for some reason classic Monty Python comedy sketches involving European football crossed the mind.

Like the “World Forum” sketch where Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung and Vladimir Lenin are broached questions about Jerry Lee Lewis’ biggest Solid Gold hit and English football. Or “The Philosophers’ Football Match” bit featuring Archimedes, Socrates, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and Kant.

British Slang
When Cooper left Thursday after his interview, he said, “I’m going to shoot off.” Shoot off means “to leave quickly, to hurriedly go.”