As the story goes, my fate was sealed weeks before I ever set foot on Capitol Hill. A brief conversation between two strangers and the wheels set in motion for a truly interesting and wonderful future.
My mother, an Atlanta native who’d arrived on the Hill ahead of her two sons to begin work for Jimmy Carter, was standing one evening in the checkout of Shelton’s Market Basket at 12th and E Streets SE. She glimpsed a curious fellow with tussled hair, gym shorts, and a tee shirt that said “Soccer on the Hill.” Mom hurried over and, with her big magnolia smile, said, “Hi, I’m Marthena! My son plays soccer!”
A true gentleman, Bryan told her all about the fledgling league he had helped start a few years back. He welcomed such conversations as players were needed in all age groups.
Weeks later, I, all of 90 pounds with knobby knees, lost in this new urban neighborhood so unlike my old Ansley Park, spotted a sheet of paper on the dining room table. Something about name, age, shirt size, practice times, eight games a season, buy your own cleats, shin guards recommended.
The rest is history – a woven tapestry involving countless children and their families and shared over decades. Soccer was my social life from 11 on through 17. Teams, usually two per age group, comprised a glorious mix of private and public school kids. Some had played before. Many had not, and some ed with their nominal fee waived. “No experience is necessary. We’ll find you some cleats. Just show up Tuesday at 6 p.m., and we’ll get you sorted.”
The practices at Watkins, or on the Mall, or across at Anacostia Park became essential weeknight oxygen for all of us, jogging, running, triangulating (don’t ask!) past sunset, and as often in my case running laps for mild hyperactive infractions. Game days were epic unless we lost.
Bryan Cassidy stands alone, not just as an original soccer dad, before “Soccer Mom” was even a thing. His legacy must be ed as a builder of community, phone call by phone call, carpool by carpool, Saturday by Saturday, skinned knee by knee. Season after season, fall and spring, Bryan Cassidy seeded and tended one of the most important shoots of my life. Without that chance encounter at dusty old Shelton’s, I would not have met Mr. Cassidy’s son, who remains my best friend, or any of the dozens of forever friends I remain in touch with on Facebook.
This is not just my story. Legions of us Hill rats can trace threads of our Capitol Hill experiences back to Bryan Cassidy and the many other soccer dads and moms who spent precious free time building Soccer on the Hill and forging a lasting community.
Bryan and Marie Cassidy arrived in Washington from Ireland in the early 1960s with Grainne, their first child of four. Marie, a truly brilliant woman, had secured a teaching job at the George Washington University Medical School, and Bryan was an architect. Like many architects who tend to see things in a different light, Bryan saw great possibility nestled around the blighted streets of Capitol Hill. The grid of rowhouses had a special charm, and real estate was cheap back then.
The growing Cassidy family bought a beautiful old row house at 810 D Street, Southeast. As that tale is told, they had just settled in when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and Capitol Hill’s main corridors filled with rioters. Still, a neighborhood full of potential. All it needed was some community, something for the kids to do. Bryan and a handful of others built Soccer on the Hill into something much more than soccer, more than something to do.
At the time and in the thick of it, we soccer rats thought quite a bit about our teams. (Note to the Rowdies: we Cougars, Panthers, Pumas, and Brazilians also thought quite a bit about you, badass and beautiful on and off the field!) We ranked all of us in our heads by obvious skill. You’d want Carl Rosenberg, Jonathan Rafuse, Vincent Turner, Frankie Servaites, Hans Tresolini on your team. On game mornings, Bryan Cassidy would pack as many kids as possible into his AMC Hornet and carry us across the river into Alexandria, where we played our games. There were not enough Hill kids back then to form a full league.
Games were epic dramas back then, each an enticing story that ended 2-0, 3-2, 10-0. Some wonderful person dutifully tallied these games, with brief summaries in the pages of this Rag. The scores and details have misted away over time. I can tell you countless epic yarns have been recounted over the years across bar stools at Tune Inn, often with added color.
I could tell you of those freezing night games, us Pumas pitted against an Alexandria team, 2-2 until the last second when Padraic Cassidy kicked a low stinger past the opposing goalie for the win. Several of us could tell the story, now 40 years gone, about the game against an Alexandria team peppered with oddly aggressive Vietnamese dudes that ended in a brawl, halted only by the firm hands of moms grasping shirt collars.
Then there was the game along the Anacostia, halted when a distressed prop plane landed on the field. Bryan Cassidy was the ref. We like to Bryan giving the pilot a red card. Did that happen? Sure.
There are many stories, some still hanging on the thinnest fact. One last one: dozens of us, thanks to the community-building spirit of Monica Servaites, shared a Soccer on the Hill reunion back in 2016 at the American Legion Hall, where we took pictures, had a kickaround, and revisited the old tales. Importantly, we honored those parents and coaches who made it all happen: Tim Temple, Ed Sower (triangulate! If you know, you know.), Roger Foley, the cab driver coach Dele Akinsiku, and Bryan Cassidy. I’m told it meant a lot to him. Bryan Cassidy meant a lot to us, and I am so thankful for the community he created for us, one that flourishes to this day.
Tim Burn, a former journalist and avid soccer rat, grew up on Capitol Hill and considers it his spiritual home. [email protected]
