Santa Barbara’s Never-Ending Love of Soccer
Huff and Puff Soccer League Still Going Strong with the Game that Never Ends
The origins of the Huff and Puff Coed Soccer League (HAPCO) go back to 1985, when Joel Schwartz approached David Stone at the end-of-season banquet of another adult soccer league. Both players loved the game but were fed up with the intensity, physicality, and machismo of the men’s league. There had to be a place where people who loved the game could go to practice their skills, get exercise, and enjoy the camaraderie of team sports.
There wasn’t. So the two men decided to do something about it — thus, HAPCO was born.
Schwartz and Stone wanted an alternative, less aggressive version of the game, and in order to dilute the testosterone that sometimes dominated the men’s games, they decided to include women and men on the same teams. In order to make it so that the women were not put off by the physicality of the men, a novel tweak was made to the rules. In each of the two 45-minute halves of the game, the women alternated between attacking and defending, and the same would hold true for the men. So the women on the Blue Team would defend in the first half while the women on the Red Team attacked, and at halftime the roles were reversed. During the half when the Blue Team’s women were attacking, the Blue men were not allowed inside the 18-yard box around the goal so that the women had more opportunities to take shots. In every game, players would have equal opportunity to work on both attacking and defending skills.
