Life is a barren field without dreams — at least according to Langston Hughes.
On Saturday, as the clock hit zeroes in Northeast’s 2-1 victory in the NJCAA Division II Men’s Soccer National Championship over Neosho County, Panthers players fell to the pitch as the dream of being champions died.
It was Neosho County’s first-ever trip to the national tournament and it had made it all the way to the championship match. For four minutes in the first half, the Panthers even held a 1-nil lead.
But in a cleanly played game on both sides, the ball bounced Northeast’s way.
Agony achieved only at the deepest points of a season are wounds that don’t always heal.
In the last 10 years, that anguish has manifested at various levels in a variety of ways in Southeast Kansas.
A few examples… In 2016, Labette Community College’s softball team was an out away from advancing to the final four of the national tournament before a booted ball allowed the tying run to reach base against LSU-Eunice.
Cardinals head coach Ryan Phillips firmly believes his team would have won a national title that year had it beaten LSU and he’ll admit, nearly a decade later, the memory of that error is haunting.
In 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NJCAA canceled all of its sports, including the national basketball tournaments.
Labette’s women’s team had qualified for the tournament under then-head coach Mitch Rolls and the Cardinals were among the few favorites to hoist the championship hardware. Rolls seldom discusses the hours and days after the national tournament’s cancellation.
Two years later, Rolls took a new job at Iowa Western, leaving behind a celebrated legacy that still feels incomplete because of that lost tournament.
Last winter, Cherryvale High School’s girls basketball team was 90 seconds away from it’s first ever league title, holding a seven-point lead over Eureka.
The deficit got erased in those last 90 seconds by Eureka, which eventually won the game in overtime. After the game, Kelsey Overacker, Cherryvale’s head coach and an alum of the school, sat against the wall on the baseline alone and cried.
Riann Mullis, the athletic director at Neosho County, spoke glowingly for 20 minutes after Saturday’s match about the successes of the men’s soccer program under head coach Elliot Chadderton. But her own sadness briefly showed when she recalled being an assistant coach for a Cowley volleyball team that finished runner-up at nationals.
Chadderton himself is in the midst of his own mourning process. The Panthers took the 10-plus hour bus ride back from Alabama to Chanute immediately after the loss. Chadderton said he didn’t sleep at all. On Tuesday, he said he still hadn’t watched the match.
Most of life is gray — winning and losing is a matter of self perception. Score is kept in sports, and the stark reality painted in black and white can overwhelm the canvas.
Hidden in the grief engulfing the Panthers in the aftermath of Saturday’s championship loss is a truth.
Chadderton, in life, has learned to love the thing he wishes most had not happened.
At 18 years old, Chadderton, who had already spent a decade in the United Kingdom in various soccer academies in youth, was cut from his club and left without a home or trajectory.
He’s spent the last 11 years coming to America for college and soccer, becoming a graduate assistant and eventually inheriting both the men’s and women’s programs at Neosho County and turning both into national contenders.
He recruits players who underwent the same anguish and heartbreak he went through at 18, giving them a home in a town not featured on any travel brochures in the U.K.
The agony those players, and Chadderton, felt on Saturday, was a gift. It was one of two possibilities for a spark that had been reignited for athletes who, without finding their way to Chanute, would have had to surrender the game.
It is a gift to exist and to chase dreams. With that pursuit comes suffering. So what punishments are not gifts?
