The following article was originally published in the November 1983 issue of "UNITED" magazine.

It is reproduced here by permission of the author, Robert P. Bomboy.

It was nothing more than a pickup game. Three-on-three.  A long shallow punt drove the other team back.  There was a fumble, another quick kick, and a score.  The scene might have been an alley in Vienna: the gray afternoon sky; the dark-haired, wiry boys; the tall houses looming up on either side.  But these boys were playing the world's most popular sport, not in Europe or Brazil, but in America.
    Soccer has been catching on like wildfire in the United States.   In fact, more than eight million Americans play in organized programs.  In Torrance, California, Cocoa Beach, Florida; along the sleepy Susquehanna River in tiny Danville, Pennsylvania; in the mountains of Boone North Carolina; even in such a NFL bastion as Dallas-Fort Worth, the soccer boom is on.
    Take the little town of Danville (population 5,500) in central Pennsylvania. It's a resounding example of soccer's new popularity.  Sixty-five miles north of Harrisburg, the state capital, Danville is a nineteenth-century mill town lying in the shadow f iron-rich hills.  From the two five-and-ten-cent stores on its main street to its tree-lined curbs and square-roofed houses, it might be Anytown, U.S.A., lifted out of the 1950s.  It was the setting for the Toni Morrison novel Song of Solomon, and it can claim a few moderately famous sons---the inventors of the cardboard box, the typewriter, and the bobby pin all were born there.  It regularly produces state-champion football teams and wrestlers; its high school band plays at two or three NFL football games each year.
    But a soccer ball had never bounced in Danville until three years ago, when several Danville parents got together to organize some exercise for their children.  " didn't know what we were getting into," admits Dr. Mike Ryan, a pediatric specialist at Geisinger Medical Center, the town's largest employer.
    By the end of the first full season, 400 players were kicking soccer balls around.  That year the Danville soccer league, affiliated from the start with the American Youth Soccer Organization, sent an all-star team to a tournament 150 miles away.
    Today Danville has four soccer fields and plans several more at a new recreation complex.  The Kiwanis Club has donated equipment.  In June, a teenage Danville team, with only three years' experience, out-played a touring West German Team, 6 to 3.  In August, Danville its second state tournament.  The local school district, impressed by the low cost of equipping teams, instituted soccer as a full-fledged high school sport this fall.
    The youth league plays a spring and fall schedule of more than 600 games with other soccer teams in a 100-square mile area spread over the mountains and valleys of central Pennsylvania.  Danville soccer, heading into its fourth year, boasts 31 teams and has close to 600 players.  Statistically, that participation is phenomenal----it means that one out of every four families in town has a boy or girl playing soccer.
    The game is easy to learn and doesn't require the beefy shoulders of a footballer or the skyscraper height of a basketballer.  Instead, it puts a premium on quickness, stamina, and mental agility.  And it is the complete participation game.  On the field, each of a soccer team's 11 players us equally involved in the action.
    The town has given its whole-hearted support.  Last fall, when a new field was needed, it took only a few days to raise $2,000 in community donations.  Every weekend during the spring and fall soccer seasons, bleachers along the side stripes are crammed with spectators from early morning to late afternoon.   Families often have several children playing, their ages ranging from 5 to 18.
    Donna Savage has six children who play soccer.  "My husband and I take turns," she laughs.  "We go from one field to another, dropping one off, dropping another off, then going back and picking them up.  but we like this program; it gives all the kids a chance to play."
    The rule is that every player must play in at least half of every game, and it has been a major reason for soccer's popularity in Danville.  No more sitting on the bench for a whole season; no more being rejected by the baseball league at the age of nine; no need to go out and make a heavy investment in equipment even before you try out.
    Small-town community support is a conditioned suburban reflex.   But an unusual twist in Danville is the participation of high-salaried professional men and women: medical doctors like Mike Ryan.
    Danville is the home of one of the nation's largest rural medical centers.  Geisinger is operated like Mayo Clinic and has 300 salaried physicians on its staff.  Even more than the city of Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic is located, Danville is dominated by the 560-bed Geisinger Medical Center and its clinic.
    Something that happened a year before the soccer program began graphically illustrates how involved the doctors are in sports.  One Friday night at a high school football game, there was a serious injury on the field.  The stadium announcer used the public-address system to ask if there was a doctor in the stands.   There were more than 100 doctors ----representing every specialty from dermatology to orthopedic surgery.  Someone in the stands called out, "What kind of specialist do you need?"  And the president of the medical center, a neurosurgeon, got up and hurried down to the field to attend to the injured player.   Since soccer's arrival in town, these same doctors have given "sports medicine" a new local meaning.
    Dr. Ryan is now regional soccer commissioner.  In addition, 15 coaches, 11 referees, the field maintenance director, and safety director are all medical doctors.
    The coaches are exceptional, mainly because of their medical training.  The league's head coach, a gastroenterologist, spent a week at camp this summer qualifying for the soccer world's equivalent of a sharpshooter's badge.   "We follow through.  We're very organized, disciplined people.  That has been the nature of our training."
    Having a doctor as a coach sometimes turns out to be a status symbol, replacing the old "My dad can beat your dad any day of the week."   One father swears he heard this conversation along the sidelines this fall: The opposing coach was ranting about a referee's call.  After a decent interval, the father saw his 11-year-old son nudge one of the opposing players.
    "Your coach better be careful," he cooed.   "Our coach can use a knife."
    "Oh, yeah?" the other boy retorted.  "What is he a hood?"
    "No," purred the Danville boy.  "He's a urologist."
    Many of the doctors have found soccer an outlet where they can get away from the intensity of their work.  "It's a totally different environment, away from work," agrees Dr. Jim Gallagher, Danville's chief referee.   "As a cancer doctor I struggle against pain and death all day.  On the soccer field, for a change, it's possible to be neutral.  I don't care which side wins, as long as they play a good game."
    Jim Gallagher is easygoing at the hospital, but he brooks no nonsense on the field.  A fierce black mustache and hard eyes tell coaches and players alike that he's in control.  He was officiating one recent game when a doctor-coach, a colleague at the hospital, began needling him from the sidelines.  It wasn't anything flagrant, no Billy Martin act.  The coach was just trying a little gamesmanship on the referee, but Gallagher would have none of it.
    Mike Ryan, who was watching, remembers: "Jim stopped the game, stopped it completely, and bellowed: 'Coach, one more word out of you, and you're out of here!' "
    Ryan, who relishes a good story, stops for a moment and leans back in his office chair.  "Now where else but on a soccer field could two eminent physicians, two colleagues, square off that way and still be friends the next day?"
    Ryan, who has four small children, coached six-year-olds in Memphis, Tennessee, before moving to Danville.  "The coaching offer was the result of a mistake," he says.  "I had never played soccer in my life.  When I registered my son in Memphis, the man right behind me in line was named John Ryan.   He played soccer in college and was very interested in coaching.  A few weeks later I got a call from someone who said, Dr. Ryan, we have your team for you.'   Well, you know what happened.  They got the wrong Ryan."
    The large, well-run soccer program he runs in Danville is a far cry from that beginning in Memphis.  Registering players in his home until 10 PM at night, submerged in schedules, lineups, and other details of the exercise idea that just grew, he admits that he occasionally wakes up in the morning wondering which is his real job, medicine or soccer.
    Ryan has grown as the soccer has grown.  "It used to be that winning meant everything to me," he says.  But somewhere along the line it finally clicked in my mind that winning or losing wasn't important; it was the satisfaction these kids got from their game.  You can't take care of a child who has cancer and than go out on the field and get upset at your soccer team for not doing the right thing.
    "A child may miss fifty kicks.  He may kick the ball in the wrong direction.  He may miss a goal.  But he'll always remember the moment when he broke away and almost scored a goal.  That's important to him.  So now I tell parents: 'Forget the negative stuff.  Don't harp on the fact that he kicked the ball in the wrong direction.  Concentrate on that one bright, shining moment when he was faster than a speeding bullet and felt like a shooting star.' "
    Pediatricians like Mike Ryan endorse soccer because it is one of the safest sports for children.  The overall injury rate among soccer players is two or three per 100 participants; and injuries, when they happen, are typically minor.
    Having so many physicians on the field is an asset when the rare injury does occur.  During one kindergarten game, for instance, the tiny Danville goalie, hardly out of wet pants, had allowed three scores in a row.  When the opposing team came flying at him again, the tot leaped for the ball, missed, and lay on the ground in front of the goal as the referee signaled another score.  After a moment, the boy's mother dashed out from the sidelines.  The referee, who was a physician, bent over the child compassionately.
    "What's wrong?" cried the distraught mother.
    "Don't worry.  He's just swallowed something," the doctor told her.
    "Swallowed!" the woman screamed.  "What did he swallow?"
    "It's all right," whispered the doctor gently.   "I think he's swallowed his pride."

[Writer Robert P. Bomboy is a content, soccer-loving resident of Danville, Pennsylvania.]