Blue Lines

"I remember the first--the weekend before we were going to have our first home game with the Jets and I had to paint the game field which is also the football field, and that was a battle, that was a battle that had to be won as well because this was all a turf battle between the football powers and the emerging community. And originally they wanted us to play at Bray Park, but we could not play at Bray Park because they didn't have any lights there so we wouldn't be able to host games at night and in the Fall, once the time changed, we wouldn't be able to host games at all, you know, because it would be dark and when you host games in the playoffs, you're supposed to host them at 7pm so there'd be no way we would be able to do that. And there were a bunch of schools in North Carolina that were using those fields for soccer. This was not a new thing in North Carolina. It was a new thing in many of the rural communities. But not in Raleigh or in Charlotte or Winston-Salem. They had soccer programs forever for crying out loud. But in rural communities were football was king, they felt that this was a threat to their standing and their recruitment of athletes and they didn't want to share facilities. And there's a real lesson in that, that's a big lesson I've learned over time about sharing. But like I said, what I never forget is the first time I painted the field and we have to use blue paint, as opposed to white paint, the football team used white paint for its grid iron and we would use blue paint out the lines for the soccer field. And painting over that field, blue for soccer, white for football was really symbolic as to what was happening in the community. And there were complaints about, "What were these blue lines of the field doing on our field?" but hey, we still had to play."