By Jordan Moore
On a warm Friday afternoon last September, USC women’s soccer head coach Keidane McAlpine surveyed McAlister Field and filled with emotion. On the one side, Arkansas-Pine Bluff fielded a predominantly black team, while on the other, the Women of Troy countered with several talented African-American athletes playing the beautiful game at a high level.
For McAlpine, the only African-American player on his college team, the moment stood out as significant. Soccer, a sport that has captivated the world for more than a century, was finally showing progress in his community.
When he learned the game as a child in Huntsville, Alabama, soccer was barely a blip on the American radar. For the African-American community in the South, it did not even register.
“All football,” McAlpine summed up the sporting interests of the natives. However, Pelé and Thomas McAlpine had other ideas for young Keidane and his sister.
“My dad, when he was in New York, went and saw Pelé play,” the son recalled the story that changed his destiny. “From that day forward, he thought it was the game that he wanted me to play.”
McAlpine’s mother and father grew up less than 10 minutes apart in Greene County, Alabama, but did not meet until years later in Atlanta. His father was getting his PhD at Penn State when Keidane was born, and soon moved the family back down to Alabama, where he would spend most of his career at Alabama A&M in Huntsville.
“From a young age, he had me out in the yard, kicking a ball around,” Keidane said. “In Huntsville, Alabama A&M at that time was one of the best HBCU (historically black colleges and universities) soccer playing schools. They played everybody. So, that’s how I got into it.”
Huntsville is a city of engineers, drawing an eclectic mix of foreigners to northern Alabama. While the other kids crashed heads on the gridiron, Keidane kicked it with Ethiopians, Caribbeans and Iranians in the local park. His father, along with others in the soccer-centric community, helped organize games and leagues to make sure the kids were always playing.
The sport made Keidane different, but not an outcast. On the pitch, he befriended Jason Lockhart, who has competed with him and against him their entire lives, and now serves as McAlpine’s trusted assistant at USC. They could hang athletically no matter what the game, but soccer was their passion.
“It was never an issue,” said McAlpine about fitting in despite his alternative passion. “We were good at what we did. They were good at what they did.”
McAlpine went on to captain Birmingham Southern as a four-year starter, and played a season professionally for the Tennessee Rhythm in the A League before returning to his alma mater to begin his coaching odyssey. Still just 40, the coach has already spread his love for the beautiful game in three of the country’s four corners from Auburn to Washington State and now USC.
Keidane’s route to soccer was obviously unique and not exactly scalable across the country, so he puts the evolution of the sport more in the hands of Major League Soccer, which has created an academy system to take the financial pressure off less privileged prospects; and Title IX, which opened up a glut of college scholarships in the women’s game.
He also points to the battle for prized real estate on the bedroom walls of children across America. Can Jozy Altidore ever compete with LeBron James for that coveted space?
“My biggest influence to this day was still Pelé. I had a Pelé poster on my wall,” said McAlpine. “That’s always the beginning.”
McAlpine may not have the same effect on the sport as Pelé, but he knows he has a role to play not only in maximizing the potential of the USC women’s soccer program, but being a proud representative of the sport in the African-American community.
“When you look around the landscape of head coaches that are African-American in the Big 5 [conferences], I think there are only three of us, and we all got hired in the last three years,” said McAlpine. “Every day, we are still just trying to establish ourselves in the sport, and that just means more and more of us have to play. Everything that I do and my success only paves the way for the next person to come and do it, and do it well.”
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)