richagnello
"We're more than eagles, we soar even higher!"
You might expect such a team motto, inscribed on the patch of their uniform sleeves, to befit a boys' youth soccer squad known as FC Aviators. And needless to say, when a boisterous bunch like these kids are based in an historic aviation city such as Wichita, Kansas, well, of course, you'd just expect them to naturally soar even higher on the pitch, right?
Well, maybe not, if you asked their coach going way back to their little shaver days of Under 8 rec league before ultimately reaching the pinnacle of the Dallas Cup well into their middle school years at the Under 14 elite select level. Andy Founder is about as local as they come, and many of the FC Aviators' fathers remember his phenom reputation on their city's fields and beyond to his playing days at Wichita State.
What nobody knows about this coach called Andy, greatly loved and endlessly followed by his players, but increasingly seen as overly ethical and uncompromisingly patient by some of his parents in the bleachers, is what Mr. Founder really adores. You won't find it in his team pep talks, and he didn't learn it when he attained his elite US Soccer National A Coaching Badge long before his peers and right after his twenty-fifth birthday, nonetheless.
Yet if you are up long before dawn, day after day and year after year, in the back pew of his parish Perpetual Adoration chapel, dressed for his day job and with the FC Aviators' gear in the trunk prepped for their after work practices and games, Coach Andy would show you who was the eternally soaring source of his true adoration.
Through more "first hours of the day" than humanly fathomable, the truly adored one spoke to the FC Aviators' coach, and the FC Aviators' coach would speak in silence to his truly adored one.