Lee Clewell travels 45 minutes from Wilson Borough to give his sons a chance to get soccer lessons with Dario Villafana.
It's the basics, getting a feel for the ball that the elder Clewell hopes will help his son Benjamin, 18, when he goes out for the team at Northampton Community College in the fall.
Like the Clewells, other kids come to benefit from Villafana's training on a pitch perched high in Mountain View Park.
It's a small, reasonably priced soccer club that teaches fundamentals with an eye on building a large training system under the team name FC Ulindi. The "FC" stands for "football club" as the millions of soccer fans worldwide have come to know.
The program started as a free clinic offered through a local church, but slowly, it's becoming more structured with weekly practices.
Semi-pro
The program is in its incubator stages.
So far, Villafana, a Trinidad native who lives in East Stroudsburg, has hired a marketing company to build a website complete with a code of conduct and a page for future sponsors.
As soccer becomes a bigger force in United States sports culture, buoyed by its major league teams and impressive displays in international competition, there are more opportunities for serious training here in the Poconos.
Shastri Spencer, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, is part of Villafana's coaching staff.
The former East Stroudsburg University player is currently one of the stars of the Pocono Snow, a semi-pro team based here. Spencer, a licensed coach, helps round out Villafana's small staff that works with young players from the spring through the fall.
"The objective is to develop kids from 5 to 18," said Villafana, who played semi-pro soccer for 10 years in Trinidad for a team called Carab Peterborough.
"When I look at some of the kids that play around here, although they might be playing for a number of years, they still lack the fundamentals."
It's that dexterity on the soccer pitch, that knowledge of how to make a graceful kick with the instep that separates the stars from the weekend players.
Villafana said he wants to not only develop a program that will help kids make it all the way to college-level soccer, but also to create a traveling team that can go as far as Latin America and the Caribbean, places where soccer is a year-long activity embedded in daily life.
Warrior spirit
Herlene Raphael, an East Stroudsburg resident who is originally from Haiti, brings her three children to learn from Villafana.
"He's great with children," she said, sitting on the grass at the field, watching her children take turns doing various drills.
"This is the most important sport we have in the West Indies," she said. "It's one of the structured ways of getting young people together."
Her children, who range from 6 to 10 years old, come two times a week to train.
Raphael, a nurse at Pocono Medical Center, said she first learned about Villafana's program when he offered free lessons through their Seventh Day Adventist church.
Villafana looks a few years younger than his 45 years. He's patient with the littlest players, while being stern with the older ones. He doesn't bark directions. Instead, he firmly instructs them on how to make the moves better.
He charges parents $300 for a year of training and even works with those who may not be able to pay.
"It's a love," he said about his coaching.
"Here it's more reasonably priced," said Clewell, who is also a youth soccer coach. Villafana, he said, is very knowledgeable as a coach.
"He has slowly taught my son to play with more power and accuracy."
Still, the competition is serious when you look at other offerings for youth soccer in the Poconos.
"You have three main clubs within a 25-mile radius," Villafana said. "Keystone Athletic is the most established, and then you have West End Soccer Club, which is making a comeback. Then you have FC Pocono."
The nonprofit FC Pocono, based in Delaware Water Gap, was created about four years ago when local clubs East Stroudsburg Youth Soccer and the Pocono Area Shooting Stars merged, according to FC Pocono program director Maria Francis.
The soccer club has an intramural program that's open to children as young as 4, at a cost of $45 a season, fall and spring.
"Then we have the elite program for the serious soccer player," Francis said. The elite program requires kids to try out and can cost upward of $1,000 per player. Elite travel team members get to participate in the Lehigh Valley Youth Soccer League.
FC Pocono also works closely with the Pocono Snow semi-pro team.
The soccer club sponsors clinics all summer, and hosts a clinic by the New York Red Bulls professional team, which will use the same soccer pitch that Villafana's kids practice on in Mountain View Park.
While the universality of soccer is the theme of the program, its specific cultural roots are deep. Villafana chose the name "Ulindi" as a riff on the Zululand, South Africa capital of Ulundi.
It was the site of a famous battle between the British and Zulu armies in 1879.
"The philosophy I'm trying to instill is that warrior spirit," Villafana said.