Playing Through

Aztex vs. Dynamo (Courtesy of John Rivera)

Three years ago, Wes Allen thought his soccer days were done. A two-sport star at Anderson High, he'd taken a soccer scholarship at Oakland University in Michigan and started every game his freshman year.

He loved the game, but he missed Austin more, and in transferring back home to the University of Texas, which doesn't have a men's team, he came to the sad conclusion that soccer held no future for him.

That was before a buoyant Brit named Phil Rawlins showed up. I'm going to assume Rawlins made pretty good money in high tech sales before taking a flier last January on a professional soccer team, the Austin Aztex. Rawlins is a serious guy who is seriously devoted to the game (he is one of the owners of the Stoke City Football Club, of the English Premier League), but like a lot of soccer enthusiasts, I knew not to get my hopes up. We may play soccer as kids, but few of us watch it as adults, and league after league has run aground on the shoals of indifference.

And yet, and yet ... a professional soccer team somehow seemed fitting for Austin. Despite the passion for Longhorn football, Austin has a soccer vibe, especially the kind of soccer that Rawlins envisioned, which would be more of a club than just a team, something you join up with as a kid and remain a member of long after your playing days are done.

Anyway, vibe or no vibe, as far as Wes Allen was concerned, any semiserious team seemed a godsend. "This is my chance," he told me a year ago, after making the Aztex Under-23 development squad. "I'm going to run with it."

After the U23 squad won the mid-South division in 2008, Allen was one of three players from the team to get an e-mail in January from Adrian Heath, head coach of the Aztex's professional team. Now, when you're offered a sports contract, the thing to do is to hold out for months, refuse to show up for training camp, and generally make an ass of yourself. But that's not how Allen, an econ major at UT, played it. "I just agreed to whatever they offered me," he said.

Which is not to say he doesn't have his sights set on ambitions above and beyond the Aztex – of playing in Major League Soccer or perhaps in Europe. "I feel like I'm getting closer to that level," he allowed. That may seem a little presumptuous for the center back. After all, so far Allen has only played two professional games, both of them friendly exhibition matches against teams from the MLS – the New England Revolution and the Houston Dynamo. (The Aztex play their last interleague friendly against the Columbus Crew Saturday and kick off the season a month later, hosting the Minnesota Thunder on April 18.) But something tells me that Rawlins won't begrudge Allen his optimism. After all, Rawlins has some pretty implausible dreams of his own, starting with a soccer-specific Aztex stadium smack in the middle of Downtown Austin.

Here's hoping those dreams come true.