With the kind of mentoring 130 Bay Area kids received on a recent Sunday, it’s no wonder so many of the same young faces come back year after year for Maccabi team tryouts.
Likewise, the volunteer coaches of the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center Maccabi program were clearly having a blast Sunday crafting their perfect sports teams — which probably explains why so many of them are repeat performers as well.
“It’s hard to believe, but I think we have more than 150 years’ worth of coaching experience out there working with these kids,” said Sherri Smith, program director of the Albert L. Schultz JCC-based Maccabi team.
Volunteer coaches come from all walks of life. Some are parents of kids vying for a particular team in another division, others are working professionals with no familial ties to the kids, but a desire to be involved in coaching. Some also coach city league or high school teams.
Still others are young — college students and athletes, themselves alumni of the Maccabi experience, who don’t want to let go.
The team trainers took to the fields of the JCC in Palo Alto, where 13- to 16-year-olds from all over the Bay Area tried out for the 2003 delegation to the Maccabi Youth Games.
Late this summer, after weeks of training, the Northern California delegation will go to either Houston or St. Louis, depending on the age group. There, they will compete in 17 sports against other Jewish teams from cities throughout the United States, Mexico, Poland, Venezuela, Australia and Israel.
Though the Albert L. Schultz JCC has been involved in the Maccabi games for 17 years, this winter’s tryouts were different than in years past — most notably due to the absence of the San Francisco JCC. For the last nine years, it had participated under the umbrella of the Albert L. Schultz JCC’s Northern California delegation.
San Francisco will be sending its own delegation this summer, leaving room for both delegations to send more athletes to the July and August games.
As always, players will stay with host families and have the chance to interact with many other Jewish kids — experiences as important as the games themselves, coaches say.
“It’s a Jewish experience for many of these kids who’ve grown up in areas with not as many Jews,” said Davia Love, a Burlingame attorney and manager of the girls volleyball team.
“There are 1,700 Jews in each of the two cities they’ll be competing in. It’s a tremendous bonding experience for all of them, the kind that leaves an impression,” she said.
The games occur during formative years for the players, a time when many discover a new sense of confidence and self-reliance.
“A lot of them have never left home before,” said girls volleyball coach Bradley Solomon. “A lot of them play in high school or on league teams already, but they’re a bit more nervous with [Maccabi games] because they’re traveling across the country with us.”
This year will be Solomon’s eighth taking the team out of California to play in the games. By day he is a prosecutor in the S.F. District Attorney’s Office. He took up coaching after his wife, who coached the Maccabi boys basketball team, told him the games needed another volunteer. He’s been at it ever since.
This is not a small commitment, either. Training for the Maccabi competitions involves 50 hours of practice during the summer, including two intense weeks when the coaches head practice daily until the big games.
“The kids train hard, they leave home, and the next year we see them coming back to try out again,” he said.
In addition to teaching skills, they help develop teamwork and forge bonds among a mix of players from all over the region. Their efforts were just beginning at tryouts, but the results were already starting to gel.
Armed with a whistle, boys and girls soccer coach Mehrdad Elahi pummeled, tumbled and zipped across the soccer field in a tangle of middle-school kids who were playing together as if the majority of the athletes had not, in fact, just met.
“I’ve been working eight years with the boys and five years with girls teams,” said Elahi, who runs the sports program at the JCC in Palo Alto. “I look for signs of physical and mental love for the game.” Since most of the kids have these qualities, narrowing down the field is “not an easy decision,” he said. Elahi was only allowed to choose up to 11 players for each team.
The long-term goal, he said, was not only to get as many players to the games as possible, but also to get them committed enough to come back every year and eventually coach when they are too old to play on the teams.
Wes Smith, a three-year Maccabi soccer team alum and Sherri Smith’s son, is in his freshman year at Dominican University. He returned to the delegation as Elahi’s assistant coach in soccer this year.
“There’s lots of good talent out there today,” he said, keeping his eye on the younger players connecting passes in the field. “I played for three years. I enjoyed it [because] it’s not all about the sport, but about bonding and meeting other Jewish kids.”