Mapping Early Austin Soccer | 1960-1980

The 1964 Civil Rights Act mandated the desegregation of public spaces.  A few months earlier, Austin-based civil rights groups, high school students and neighborhood activists desegregated Zilker Park and Barton Springs through a series of swim-ins and park-ins.  This integration movement opened up the grassy spaces of Zilker Park to African and Latin American soccer players based at UT, East Austin residents, as well as the other players across Austin. This opening enabled soccer to go from being “played only on university campuses” to having “kids playing on almost any open field” in Austin.

Click a link below to get a sense of how soccer became part of Austin’s adult scene.

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  • A Victory at Barton Springs Pool
    By: Hunter Ellinger
    Posted: 12:00 a.m. Sunday, April 06, 2014

    As a high school and college student during 1960-64, I took part in a variety of Austin activities aimed at ending racial discrimination. This built on family history, since my parents had been active on this topic since they moved to Texas in the early 1940s (my mom, Ruth, organized the first racially-integrated Girl Scout troop in Dallas). After we moved to Austin in 1956, our home was one of the few places that had multi-racial social gatherings.

    My older sister Mickey took part in the first Austin lunch counter “sit-ins” and several other such efforts. My first active role was to pick up a project where she had been stymied two years earlier — getting permission for black Austin High seniors to fully participate in the Senior Picnic at Zilker Park, where the Barton Springs Pool would not sell tickets to African-Americans.

    My friend Robert Clarkson and I printed petitions protesting this and, with strategic help from student newspaper editor Bryan Reddick and some unused lockers for storage, were able to distribute them faster than they could be confiscated. The confiscations of course greatly increased student interest in what we were doing. The principal brought Robert to his office and phoned his father to straighten him out, but his father did not see any problem. Because of the civil rights lecture my mom had given the principal two years earlier, he did not call her. So we kept up distribution.

    The next day some anonymous pages were distributed in the school cafeteria attacking our petition as undermining the Texas way of life, probably with a communist agenda. This kept the topic on people’s minds. The following day another letter was distributed that criticized the previous letter’s logic, morality and grammar. Now people were really interested and many told their parents, several of whom called City Council members in support of our request. The next day (the day before the picnic) an intercom announcement told us that the city would let all seniors swim free at the picnic, on presentation of their student ID. So the immediate issue was defused, but no precedent of ticket sales to African-Americans had been set.

    Not that things ended there. One of the seniors, Joan Means, organized “swim-ins” every week during summer 1960 in which a mixed-race group asked to buy Barton Springs tickets and on being refused went swimming anyway. A lawyer (Sam Houston Clinton Jr., later elected to the Court of Criminal Appeals) accompanied us the first couple of times, but the city decided to ignore us. Halfway through the summer they switched to individual ticket sales, so the rest had to pay but the “colored” did not. My friend David Martinez protested that his skin was substantially darker than that of Jim Means so he should be counted as colored, but this did not match the strange logic by which discrimination was done. At the beginning of the following summer the group went back again, and they sold us all tickets. This battle was over.

  • Stanley Woodward blocks out the stark separation between recreational athletes in the United States and the rest of the world. During his visits to Europe and the Middle East, Stanley Woodward noticed that large numbers of adult men organized their time away from work around soccer, whether when they were in the service in World War II or in civilian life forcing employers to respond to the club games their employees were playing. As one worker in Israel told Woodward, “When there is a football game we do not ask the boss if we can go. We just work an hour early and catch the bus for the field.”

    Woodward pointed out that the only people who played soccer in the United States were people who “were indoctrinated in youth” in other countries. Colleges provided another very small arena for soccer, but – compared to the rest of the world – “the teams play in virtual privacy.”

    Remarkably, the ostensible reason for the essay revolved around developments in the Champion’s League in Europe.

    The 1950s and 1960s mark the low point in soccer coverage in Texas. Stanley Woodward had no memory of the home-grown soccer leagues that took up space in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Galveston.

    PDF Link:
    What's With This Football (pdf file)

    Places:
    UT Austin Soccer Fields, 2100 San Jacinto Drive, Austin, TX 78712

  • The civil rights bill mandated the desegregation of public spaces. Months earlier, civil rights groups and neighborhood activists desegregated Zilker Park and Barton Springs through a series of swim-ins and park-ins.

    This integration movement opened up the grassy spaces of Zilker Park to African and Latin American soccer players based at UT, East Austin residents, as well as the other players across Austin.

    Here, Joan Means Khabele reflects on the long struggle to desegregate Austin’s green spaces, an effort that lagged behind the desegregation of junior high schools and high schools in Austin.

    PDF Link:
    Civil Rights Bill is Hailed

  • This update on YMCA summer activities includes the first reference to soccer on public facilities.

    Buried deep in the discussion of possible activities, local college students were charged with coordinating soccer alongside tumbling, football, and softball.

    This document marks the new beginning of organized youth soccer in Austin on fields that continue to host three seasons a year of soccer.

    This program seems dedicated to only boys, and only over the summer.

    PDF Link:
    YMCA Planning Summer Fun Program

    Places:
    Town Lake YMCA, 1100 W. Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX

  • YMCA offers soccer to boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 18.

    The Austin YMCA hired Alfred Erler, a member of the UT Austin soccer theam, to coordinate the four different age divisions.

    The YMCA scheduled games for Saturdays throughout the year.

    This announcement marks the beginning of organized gender de-segregation of soccer activities in Austin.

    PDF Link:
    YMCA Soccer Offered for Youth Offered

    Places:
    Town Lake YMCA, 1100 Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX

  • The YMCA found the soccer league to be rewarding and promising. The director committed to a year-long program coordinating soccer games for boys and girls from ages 8-12.

    With 60 players, the league now matched the number of players in the 1963 San Antonio Soccer Association league.

    PDF Link:
    YMCA Soccer Said "Success"

    Places:
    Town Lake YMCA, 1100 W. Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX

  • The locations for soccer increased in the mid 70s. The Austin Municipal Soccer league now scheduled games for either Zilker Park Fields or Disch Field, a softball stadium located between Riverside Drive, Barton Springs Drive, South 1st, and Lamar Avenue.

    PDF Link:
    Soccer League in Action Today (More Fields)

    Places:

    • Disch Field
    • Zilker Park

  • Festival organizers included the final round of the Austin Men’s Soccer league in their schedule of events at the ‘happening’ at Town Lake. This is more evidence of both the presence and the novelty of soccer in Austin.

    PDF Link:
    Lady Bird Johnson to Head "Happening on Town Lake"

    Place:
    Zilker Park, Austin, Texas

  • In 1974, Roy Mark interviewed Phil Friday, one of the founders of the Austin Municipal Soccer League. As Phil pointed out, the league grew out of a pre-existing pickup soccer network and a local convenient post-game recreational facility. What the group of friends did was create a framework to avoid “calling friends to round up the necessary numbers.” In the ensuing two years, the Austin Municipal Soccer League [AMSA] grew to 14 teams and two hundred participants.

    The presence of players associated with the University of Texas, the local Air Force base, and locals on the fields of Zilker Park speaks to the conjoined impact of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Higher Education Act and the 1965 Immigration Act. Roy Mark points out that “most clubs list college professors with Phds, lawyers, doctors, and a great many students.” The top team in Austin at the time, Santos, included people who grew up playing in England, Scotland, Ecuador, Mexico, and Cyprus. As Phil Friday pointed out. “the appeal to most of us older guys is that you get to meet people from all over the world.”

    The article is caught pointing out the ways in which soccer in Austin reflected the recreational aspirations of college-educated professionals and the loose, improvisational and ‘weird’ bar culture of Austin. The Tavern, a bar on Barton Springs Drive with “a macho atmosphere. Rough hewn tables with rickety, mixed and never matching chairs, uneven concrete floors, a battered pay phone, and awfully cold beer,” ended up being the place where players planned out the origins of AMSA, a league that carried through to the present.

    Phil Friday still plays with his son Chris Friday in the over 50 team Balcones Escarpment.

    PDF Link:
    Origins Traced to Local Bar

    Places:

    • Tavern, 424 S. Lamar Blvd, Austin, TX
    • Zilker Park, 210 Lou Neff Road, Austin, TX
    • Remote Sensing, Department of Geology, UT Austin, 23 San Jacinto Drive
    • Red Barons, UT Law School, UT Austin, 727 E. Dean Keeton Drive, Austin, TX 78712
    • St. Edwards University, 3001 S. Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78704
    • Bergstrom Air Force Base, 3923 Berkman Drive, Austin, TX 78723
    • Austin YMCA, 1000 Cesar Chavez Blvd
    • Air Force ROTC, 116 Inner Campus Drive, Austin, TX
    • Other
    • Mexico
    • England
    • Scotland
    • Ireland
    • Hungary
    • France
    • Germany
    • Ecuador
    • Mexico
    • Cyprus
    • Italy
    • Brazil

  • By 1974, there were enough players to have two divisions of adult recreational soccer. The city league division two included club teams from the University of Texas at Austin, St. Edwards University, Bergstrom Air Force Base, Air Force ROTC and the YMCA. Locals also organized a team unaffiliated with a specific institution. Division One teams included teams from local universities as well as teams using the names of other more established clubs in Mexico, Brazil and Italy.

    In a direct result of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, the 1965 Immigration Act and the 1965 Higher Education Act, Don Nkweji, a UT Austin students became once again the lead scorer in Austin’s city leagues.

    Places:

    • Zilker Park, Barton Springs Drive
    • Town Lake YMCA, 1100 Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX
    • Soccer Zone, Austin, TX

  • Alfred Erler, the coordinator for the Austin YMCA league, pointed out the disjuncture between the popularity of soccer among children and its absence as a varsity team with eligible scholarships. This situation continues to this day for men at the Texas State University and the University of Texas at Austin.

    Alfred Erler may be inaugurating another theme in his appeal for more support and recognition from non-playing adults, that soccer is inordinately affordable compared to other varsity sports, particularly football.

    He also used a phrasing familiar to many coaches and fans: “last year, to some extent, we outplayed some opponents, but we didn’t outscore them.”

    One of the players mentioned, Pablo Taboada, started an art career in Austin after his time as a soccer player at the University of Texas at Austin: https://www.facebook.com/utbenson/photos/austin-based-artist-pablo-taboada-a-native-of-chile-has-died-taboada-was-known-f/10152852132027817/

    PDF Link:
    Same Old Story for UT Soccer

    Places:
    UT Austin Intramural Fields, 4900 Guadalupe, Austin, Texas

  • This is the first photograph of soccer in Austin in the Austin Statesman.

    The image points to the way soccer took substantial root in Austin, through participation in youth leagues across the city.

    Soccer, in this version, was “open to both boys and girls.”

    PDF Link:
    Pint Sized Soccer

    Places:
    Town Lake YMCA, 1100 Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX

  • This is a Sunday magazine addition explaining the rules and reasons why soccer exists to an interested audience. The reporter chose Jollyville to point out how the sport was taking root even in unexpected places. The article also pointed out that the Austin Y had girls and boys play together but that Jollyville Optimist Club separated the genders.

    Even though soccer had been regularly covered in the San Antonio Express and the Statesman, this piece – “As American – as soccer?” – still treats the sport as an eccentric strangely popular sport, like spikeball in 2018. The article does bring out its appeal to parents, as Phyllis Bartling points out “the kid isn’t standing up there either hitting the ball or missing it and striking out. The kid doesn’t tend to get pigeonholed into right field. They’re running, kicking at the ball, yelling, having a good time.” The reporter emphasized the autonomy soccer players enjoy, as “coaches have a tendency to control the game too much in baseball and football… in soccer, you cannot do that.”

    The article points out that there were 30 adult recreational teams in Austin, all playing on Zilker park fields, and that 24 high school and three junior high school teams across the Austin independent School District. Still, these numbers paled compared to other places like Dallas, where there were more than 50,000 people registered as soccer players.

    This is the first article to mention the Austin Women’s league, where “Women, watching men play, began kicking a ball around the sidelines and eventually formed the Austin Women’s Soccer League.” At this point, the memory of women’s leagues in 1920s and 1930s Texas cities had been lost.

    PDF Link:
    As American As Soccer Photo

    Place:
    Optimist’s Club, 9100 Meadowheath Drive, Jollyville, TX

  • “You can fund a whole soccer team on what it costs to suit one football player.”

    This article announces all the possibilities of soccer in Austin in fall 1997.

    This is the first announcement for the women’s league in Austin, where organizers expected at least 20 teams to emerge. Rather oddly, the organizers did not arrange to have referees present for the first round of games for the league.

    The YMCA maintained a co-ed league for ages 6 to 14.

    PDF Link:
    Getting involved in Soccer - Key Dates

    Places:

    • Zilker Park, 2115 Lou Neff Road, Austin, TX 78704
    • Zilker Park II, 0104060102, Austin, TX 78704
    • Coed YMCA Soccer, Murchison Junior High, 3700 N. Hills Drive, Austin, TX
    • Central YMCA Soccer, Williams Field, 1100 W. Cesar Chavez Drive
    • Jollyville Town and Country Optimists Club, 9100 meadowheath drive, Jollyville, TX
    • Austin Parks and Rec, Guerrero Park,
    • Freshman Field [Now Caven-Clark Lacrosse center], 2100 san Jacinto Drive, Austin, TX 78712

  • “America has a slim lead but has played one game less than the Shiner and the Playboys, who are one and two points behind.”

    Both Club America and the Shiner [now the River City Rangers] are teams who still have teams playing in the Austin Men’s Soccer Association. That is 40 years of continuous play and presence in central Texas, and in the case of the over 50 division, 40 years of playing in Austin.

    The article also includes a photo by Zach Ryall of a corner-kick situation, the first action pick of local adult soccer in the Statesman, only 31 years after the San Antonio Express managed to take their own picture.

    PDF Link:
    Photo - Soccer Teams Vie

    Place:
    Zilker Park, 2115 Lou Neff Road, Austin, TX

  • “Division A … will participate in the capitol Area city soccer championships.”

    This document marks the link between soccer in Austin and the larger United States Soccer Federation. The upper echelons of youth soccer decided to create an umbrella organization – the Capital Area Youth Soccer Association – that provided an organization that linked private soccer clubs to city leagues and to the YMCA leagues.

    Places:
    Northwest YMCA, 5807 Mcneil Drive, Austin, TX

  • “It’s a small wonder that interest in soccer is taking off….

    This is another review of soccer in Austin and its short history. However, this article marks a milestone for the institutionalization of soccer in Austin. The Austin independent School District voted to make soccer a core sport in its schools.

    And should you doubt it, take a look at Zilker Park on any fall weekend. Or any soccer field for that matter. You’ll find them tucked away on high school playing fields, on civic club grounds, in parks – any place where there’s enough room to accommodate 22 players and 2 goal areas.” – Linda Anthony

    “Tired of watching from the sidelines, women formed a league of their own five years ago and follow a season of similar intensity to the men’s.” – Linda Anthony

    PDF Link:
    Soccer Big Kick in Austin

    Places:

    • Zilker Park, 2115 Lou Neff Road, Austin, TX 78704
    • Zilker Park II, 0104060102, Austin, TX 78704
    • Coed YMCA Soccer, Murchison Junior High, 3700 N. Hills Drive, Austin, TX
    • Central YMCA Soccer, Williams Field, 1100 W. Cesar Chavez Drive
    • Jollyville Town and Country Optimists Club, 9100 meadowheath drive, Jollyville, TX
    • AISD Central, 1111 W. 6th street, Austin, TX

  • “Soccer is going to mushroom in Austin as these kids grow into the upper age brackets.” – Curtsi Dickson, Optimist Club

    This article treats the growth of sex-segregated youth soccer leagues in suburban Austin. The optimist clubs of Austin provided the social capital and physical infrastructure the growth of girls’ leagues across Austin. The author points out that the YMCA and the city of Austin parks and rec maintained coed leagues through the 70s. One of the reasons given for this decision was that “most parents prefer that their daughters play on girls only teams. The girls are very competitive.”

    PDF Link:
    Old Game of Soccer Growing Fast

    Places:

    • South Austin Boys Club, 1000 Cumberland drive, Austin, TX
    • East Austin Optimist Club, 900 Thompson, Austin, TX
    • Jollyville Optimists Club, 9100 Meadowheath Drive, Jollyville
    • Reznicek Field, 401 W. St. Johns Avenue, Austin, TX

  • “the group was formed in June in order to coordinate youth soccer activities in this area. It will promote soccer through coach and referee clinics, help new leagues form, and to determine area champions who will advance to the state championships.”

    In the space of five years, the following organizations developed youth soccer leagues.

    • Town and Country Optimists Club
    • South Austin Boys Club
    • Northwest YMCA
    • Westlake
    • Lampasas
    • Georgetown
    • East Austin Optimists
    • University Hills Optimists
    • Lake Travis
    • Round Rock
    • Downtown YMCA

    The City of Austin Park and Rec leagues are missing from this list. The Capitol Area Youth Soccer Association grew out of a non-profit organizations and privately affiliated organizations.

    PDF Link:
    Area Youth Soccer Begins, Austin Missing

  • The fruits of the Capitol Area Youth Soccer Association bear fruit. The Aztecs, champions of the Northwest YMCA league, also win the first area wide soccer championship.

    This seems to be an all boys team, and an integrated team.

    PDF Link | Photo - Aztecs Take Title

  • PDF Link:
    Photo | Soccer Interests High

  • A Victory at Barton Springs Pool
    By: Hunter Ellinger
    Posted: 12:00 a.m. Sunday, April 06, 2014

    As a high school and college student during 1960-64, I took part in a variety of Austin activities aimed at ending racial discrimination. This built on family history, since my parents had been active on this topic since they moved to Texas in the early 1940s (my mom, Ruth, organized the first racially-integrated Girl Scout troop in Dallas). After we moved to Austin in 1956, our home was one of the few places that had multi-racial social gatherings.

    My older sister Mickey took part in the first Austin lunch counter “sit-ins” and several other such efforts. My first active role was to pick up a project where she had been stymied two years earlier — getting permission for black Austin High seniors to fully participate in the Senior Picnic at Zilker Park, where the Barton Springs Pool would not sell tickets to African-Americans.

    My friend Robert Clarkson and I printed petitions protesting this and, with strategic help from student newspaper editor Bryan Reddick and some unused lockers for storage, were able to distribute them faster than they could be confiscated. The confiscations of course greatly increased student interest in what we were doing. The principal brought Robert to his office and phoned his father to straighten him out, but his father did not see any problem. Because of the civil rights lecture my mom had given the principal two years earlier, he did not call her. So we kept up distribution.

    The next day some anonymous pages were distributed in the school cafeteria attacking our petition as undermining the Texas way of life, probably with a communist agenda. This kept the topic on people’s minds. The following day another letter was distributed that criticized the previous letter’s logic, morality and grammar. Now people were really interested and many told their parents, several of whom called City Council members in support of our request. The next day (the day before the picnic) an intercom announcement told us that the city would let all seniors swim free at the picnic, on presentation of their student ID. So the immediate issue was defused, but no precedent of ticket sales to African-Americans had been set.

    Not that things ended there. One of the seniors, Joan Means, organized “swim-ins” every week during summer 1960 in which a mixed-race group asked to buy Barton Springs tickets and on being refused went swimming anyway. A lawyer (Sam Houston Clinton Jr., later elected to the Court of Criminal Appeals) accompanied us the first couple of times, but the city decided to ignore us. Halfway through the summer they switched to individual ticket sales, so the rest had to pay but the “colored” did not. My friend David Martinez protested that his skin was substantially darker than that of Jim Means so he should be counted as colored, but this did not match the strange logic by which discrimination was done. At the beginning of the following summer the group went back again, and they sold us all tickets. This battle was over.