PICKUP GAMES OF NEW YORK: FORT GREENE SOCCER CLUB

Every pickup soccer game has a style and character all its own. In this new series, I’ll describe various games around the city, starting with the one I’ve played in the most.

The best pickup soccer fosters community, as much as a fiery love for the game. No game embodies this better than Fort Greene Soccer Club, which has been going for decades on the dirt pitch (a.k.a. the “dust bowl”) in the heart of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. Itai Gruss, a 25-year-old operations manager who grew up across the street, used to watch his father play, before joining himself as a teen. “The park was a scary place back then,” he says. “But whenever a game was going on, everybody felt safe.”

I came to Fort Greene Soccer Club shortly after moving to nearby Clinton Hill in 2007. From the outside, the game looked pretty rough and tumble, and the rocky pitch wasn’t exactly inviting. But once I screwed up the courage to ask to join, and showed a passion for the sport, I was welcomed with open arms, if also the occasional elbow.

The game used to attract enough ballers for three or four teams, with the same diversity of its surrounding community. Five continents might be represented on a single side—maybe players from Japan, Morocco, France, Colombia, and Jamaica, their respective styles meshing in balletic, multicultural brilliance. It was always winners-stay-on, which stoked the competitive fires, and tempers too. But however heated the play, matches always ended in a handshake, and maybe a barbecue or house party to follow.

The numbers started to dip a few years back, after a faction of more recent Fort Greene residents grumbled about the trampled grass and clouds of dust. “Lawn-menacing soccer players and those who want the grass to grow are at odds in a Brooklyn park,” is how the New York Times characterized the debate (unfairly, in my mind, though I’m not the most reliable narrator.) At one point, the parks department even raised a lathe-and-wire fence to limit ball games. But in time the fence disappeared, and play resumed.

Fort Greene Soccer Club is still looking to regain its heydey momentum. But the spirit lives on. And on those magical weekend afternoons when the Fort Greene core comes out, it’s some of the best, fiercest pickup soccer in the borough. And the community that’s thrived around the game for so long is still the tightest I’ve ever known.