Gloom and Goals

The evening after a morning snowstorm that shut down schools and city government offices alike, 10 players in teams of five sporting either blue or green jerseys yelled out to one another inside the gym at Christian Life Church.

The players who hoped to join Santa Fe’s newest sports venture kicked a ball around the basketball court with nets placed on the floor as team owner David Fresquez looked on. The ball whizzed into the net.

“I knew it,” the goalie said in Spanish with a grin.

A total of roughly 20 people attended a preliminary tryout for the city’s first professional futsal team, which will join the National Futsal Premier League as the Santa Fe Gloom—a nod to the Zozobra tradition. The team will compete against others in the league’s Southwest division, which includes teams in Albuquerque, Arizona and Colorado.

“This is the first pro soccer or futsal team in Santa Fe’s history, and I think that this is going to open up so many doors for our youth, and provide a lot of hope and a lot of inspiration for the youth to become pro soccer players,” Fresquez tells SFR. “And the cool thing is we’ll be playing at Santa Fe High School, so that connection to public schools I think is cool. We’re very fortunate that they opened up their doors to us.”

Coach Leandro Carlos will lead the team.

The Santa Fe Gloom represents Fresquez’s second attempt at a new sports operation in recent memory. At the beginning of the year, Fresquez tried to start an indoor soccer team to join the Major Arena Soccer League 2 using the Genoveva Chavez Community Center’s ice rink in partnership with the City of Santa Fe. Ultimately, city officials axed that plan shortly after, citing financial constraints regarding the rink conversion amid outcry from skaters.

The futsal league, according to its website, provides “a gateway for players to gain experience and help prepare them to move to other levels, whether that’s pro futsal, pro indoor, pro outdoor.” Indoor soccer and futsal have similar rules, but some notable differences include a smaller and heavier ball and fewer players—just five per side with futsal compared to six for soccer, Fresquez says.

Presci Ruiz, a Santa Fe High School coach, tells SFR he joined Fresquez’s effort as an organizer and assistant coach for the team because he knew Fresquez “wants to create a nice program.”

“It’s a good opportunity for the kids. There’s a lot of talent here in Santa Fe,” Ruiz tells SFR. “We’re trying to develop a program that will take them out of the city to play and experience something else.”

While players won’t be paid per game or with a salary, “there’s going to be some opportunity for payment,” including meals, travel and incentives for good performance during games, Fresquez says.

Fresquez, who serves as the president of Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, plans to use his connections to help find sponsors for the team. In the meantime, however, he’s supplying the cash through his own business—Age Friendly Senior Care.

Eventually, he says, the Santa Fe Gloom could become “a farm team or a feeder team” through which players gain experience before they continue to level up further in the field, such as joining the New Mexico United.

Team member Nicholas Cashmere tells SFR he’s “always been ingrained in soccer,” and he played five youth seasons before playing Division 1 in college. Later, he had several stints in pro and pro-development leagues. Now, he’s back and excited to play in the upcoming season in a new environment, he says.

“This program is really different. Growing up in Washington, there’s a lot of indoor soccer, and not a lot of futsal, so seeing how large the futsal community is here as opposed to...indoor or even outdoor is something that’s really new to me,” Cashmere says.

As the first game approaches, both Fresquez and Ruiz say they believe what separates the Santa Fe Gloom from the rest is the dedication.

“It snowed today in Santa Fe, and the city closed essentially, but you can see, we’ve got this going on at 8 pm,” Fresquez says. “These guys want to be here. That’s extremely notable that they came out on a snowy, cold day to play soccer.”