COCONUTS
1986. 5th grade soccer team. Birmingham, AL.
Kind of a crappy scan, but you can tell me from the others by my hair. (Left of center, the silhouette of my boofonic perm on Coach Leeth’s shirt.) Our school colors were “gold” and white and we were allowed to choose the name of our team. We were so close to being The Bananas but barely dodged irony when the team decided “The Altamont Coconuts” had a better ring to it. We were like the Bad News Bears of soccer; that or junior teamsters with Coach as our Hoffa. We were occasionally exploited for search and destroy missions for Leeth’s upper-school enemies. He’d eyeball some unsuspecting guy he hated, yell “open season,” and we’d swarm some huge 17 year-old like fire ants would take down a grasshopper. Never really minded much since I had so much bottled aggression. I just wanted to see what it looked like when someone was force-fed grass.
Linus Kim submitted this to 