http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/nyregion/thecity/13foot.html?ref=soccerHarlem
By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: May 13, 2007
West Harlem is swarming with real estate speculators these days, so a worldly bystander might not have been surprised to see Irv Smalls Jr. looking covetously the other day at a trash-strewn lot on 114th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
But Mr. Smalls, a 34-year-old former Penn State football player, was not imagining river views or calculating square footage. “To me,” he said, “that’s a futsal field. That’s perfect. Please.”
Futsal is a compact, five-on-five form of soccer, invented in Uruguay in 1930 and popular around the world, especially as a training sport for young players. But for Mr. Smalls, who is now the executive director of a youth soccer club called FC Harlem Academy, its selling point is that the sport and its variants can be played on small concrete surfaces — for example, on a patch of bare cement at the edge of Taft Houses, a public housing project, which he had surveyed with delight that afternoon.
At other points in the day, Mr. Smalls had similar reactions to a brace of handball courts and to a fenced-in strip beneath a stretch of Metro-North tracks over Park Avenue, studded with widely spaced concrete pillars. “The fields could be between the pillars,” he announced happily.
Armed with photographs of such corners throughout Harlem, Mr. Smalls has begun seeking permission from the city and support from donors for a plan he calls Concrete2Green. He would like to lay rubberized mats, painted with futsal lines. over such areas around the neighborhood. He envisions a culture of gritty pickup street soccer, much like the culture that exists around basketball.
“In the rest of the world, soccer is an inner-city sport,” Mr. Smalls said. “I want to work on this perception that it’s a white sport in this country, and played only out in the suburbs.”
On May 4, Mr. Smalls met with officials at the Parks Department; a department spokesman, Warner Johnston, said his agency thought the idea was intriguing and was looking into it.
Don Garber, the commissioner of Major League Soccer, for which Mr. Smalls worked for six years, has said he will provide marketing and perhaps financial support.
In the meantime, Mr. Smalls sometimes has his team spend a few minutes on a handball court near the field where it practices. “You have to have good control, because it’s a small space,” said Marqui Moore, one of the players. “It helps you learn your footwork.”
