The Alumni Soccer Game

Kelly Bickett

Every year, Laguna alumni and current students take to the soccer pitch in an alumni versus current students soccer game. is traditional event is for many alumni a much-anticipated part of anksgiving break.
Current student players form one team while the alumni fill up the other in a competitive, fun and often hilarious game where everyone gets to let loose.

This year the majority of the alumni were recent graduates, while a few graduated over 20 years ago.
Freshman Julia Guglielmo said that this year one of the funniest parts of the game was that “the man who played goalie was a little over 60, and every time that someone approached him to shoot, he yelled, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t do it!’ It was so funny. Everyone would break down laughing when he yelled it at the top of his lungs.”

The game means a lot to the players. “It’s a good time when you get to play a great sport while socializing with generations of excited people that attended and loved Laguna,” junior Ethan Tyng said.
The games bring the past and the present together to remember how great Laguna’s close community really is,” Guglielmo said. “It was such a fun experience to play the alumni team. To see familiar faces and then others, whom I have never seen before, showed me how tight the Laguna community stays in years past graduation.”

Senior Henry Farrell’s father, Mason Farrell, who has been playing on the alumni team for over 25 years, commented on the alumni game as something he really looks forward to. “Before joining the [Laguna] board, it was my one time a year to reconnect with the school… see old friends and meet new ones. The game has evolved from a chance to play against a bunch of kids I don’t know to playing alongside and against kids who I have come to know well over the years. It has become part of our family’s anksgiving tradition.”
The game is followed by a picnic lunch where the players and fans get to chat about their lives and share memories from Laguna.
“I met alums who had just graduated last year and alumni who had graduated at least 40 years ago,” Guglielmo said. “All of them had the same positive and grateful attitude to be welcomed back to the Laguna environment. One of the alumni I met was John Adams, who graduated from the class of 1970.”
Regarding Adams, Farrell said, “It’s remarkable that he is able to move like he does. We trade off as goalie and then run in the field when we are feeling it.”
Due to the event being so casual, there is no record of past scores; however, this year the current students won the game 5-4.