While everybody is currently swept up in World Cup fever, and soccer is more popular than ever on the Central Coast, it’s important to remember when soccer was still an outcast sport in this region. This week, Coastal View looks back at these early days, when those who played soccer were mostly immigrants and working-class men who brought the sport with them from their home countries and passed along the passion to their children on weekends at the park.
Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, most of Carpinteria’s soccer players were Latino men from Mexico, Guatemala or other Central American countries where soccer was king. When they arrived here, many found community in the Sunday soccer leagues up the coast at Santa Barbara’s Dwight Murphy Park.
By the time these men had families of their own, it was natural that the next generation picked up the same love for soccer, and by 1966, the city’s first-ever youth soccer team was organized by Teodoro Lomeli, who would come to be known as the “Godfather of Carpinteria soccer.”…