Club soccer kept in the neighborhood

Mark Arblaster had an idea.

Prior to last year, local club soccer players often had to travel to Huntington Beach or Irvine to play. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but that trip — if not a longer one — had to be made for every practice and every game.

So, Arblaster, a 46-year-old Newport Beach resident, created the Newport Mesa Soccer Club. The club, started in May, 2005, was seemingly born out of necessity.

“There were about six individual club soccer teams in the area,” Arblaster said. “Myself and [NMSC director] Chris Sarris took a look around and said, ‘Why don’t we form our own local club?’ We have about 200,000 people in the area. You’d think that’s a big enough sample size to draw some interest.”

In its second year, the club has nine girls’ teams and three boys’ teams, ranging in age from under-10 to under-19.

There are also about 200 local children participating in the Newport Mesa Soccer Club, which is 50% more than the amount the club had in its inaugural year.

Arblaster, who serves as club president and has a son who plays on the under-15 club team, is no stranger to soccer. Growing up in Dana Point, he went on to play soccer at San Diego State. Then it was on to the now-defunct North American Soccer League.

He now spends time away from his financial planning “day job” by refereeing games, anywhere from local AYSO contests to Los Angeles Galaxy matches.

“I’m a soccer guy,” he said. “That’s my sport.”

Arblaster said he’s most proud of the fact that the Newport Mesa Soccer Club, which is non-profit, has a sense of community. He said there are a couple other local clubs, but they recruit players from outside the Newport Beach-Costa Mesa-Corona del Mar area to play for them.

“As their teams get older, they start drawing players from as far away as Riverside,” Arblaster said. “We wanted to be more of a local club. One of our goals is for our kids to be starters on their Daily Pilot Cup team, then their junior high team, then their high school team.”

It sounds like a plan to Tom Anderson.

Anderson, a longtime friend of Arblaster, has two daughters in the Newport Mesa Soccer Club, one on the under-15 team and the other on the under-13 team.

He said it’s nice to have a local club for children who are ready to move past AYSO.

“AYSO is a really great place to start, but the coaches are usually dads and uncles,” Anderson said. “We actually have a former international soccer player [Tamico Davila] who’s the coach for my older daughter’s team. It’s quite an eye-opener, as far as the things he teaches them. You get a little more professionalism involved with it.”

Anderson said, as a team parent, it’s nice to play at local fields, like Bonita Canyon Sports Park in Newport Beach.

“As far as being a parent goes, driving them a mile is one thing,” he said.

“Driving them to Fountain Valley at 5 p.m. is another thing,” he added with a laugh.

Like many young organizations, finances can be an issue. Arblaster said his club charges anywhere from $500 to $1,100 per player for each season. He said that’s at least 50% less than what other clubs charge.

“All of the people who run our club, we do it on a volunteer basis,” he said. “Our costs are really low, so we could get a lot of kids who can’t normally afford to play club soccer.”

A more pressing concern, said Sarris, is lighted fields, a controversial issue in the Newport-Mesa area.

“As we grow, that’s probably our biggest challenge,” Sarris said. “The fight for lighted fields is very difficult. We’re hopeful we’ll get some, but we don’t know. Our 12 teams will have to stop practicing if they can’t find a lighted field somewhere.”

Word of mouth has been good for the club, Arblaster said, at least partly because of some of the ideas the board members have come up with.

The first Newport Mesa Cup took place last spring, with Corona del Mar, Costa Mesa, Ensign and TeWinkle junior high schools competing.

The club tracked the results of the normal spring league games between the schools, and gave out trophies to the seventh-and eighth-grade teams that compiled the best records (CdM won three and Costa Mesa won one).

In spring, 2007, the Newport Mesa Soccer Club will be offering a similar competition to the four Newport-Mesa Unified School District high schools.

“CdM girls’ Coach Bryan Middleton ran with the idea, and set up a full-blown tournament on the girls’ side,” Arblaster said. “It’s bragging rights.”

And, it all goes back to the idea of having the youth soccer program become a solid feeder program for the local high schools.

“Ideally, when I go to watch Estancia against Newport Harbor, I hope to see 16 NMSC kids out there playing against each other,” Arblaster said. “That would be a dream come true.”

But, Arblaster’s club is already a dream come true to some local club soccer players.

“We’re really the only local club that is truly homegrown,” Anderson said. “This is truly a grass-roots organization.”