Sometimes following your dream means leaving town, again and again. For a couple of Seattle native sons, they started at home and finished here. But in between they moved around a lot.
Chance Fry and Peter Hattrup both came out of local high schools in 1982, when the sun was still high in the sky for American soccer. It would go dark all too quickly.
That summer there were 28 teams, both outdoor and indoor, that were paying livable wages across the continent. Within two years, that number was cut in half, and when Fry and Hattrup reached their prime, pro soccer in this corner of the earth, after years of bleeding red ink, all but went black.
Hattrup refers to his peer group as The Lost Generation. They may have made some bucks, even gotten a taste of MLS or made a World Cup squad. Yet there’s long been a lingering question of what might’ve been.
If there was a silver lining, says Hattrup, the game was overflowing with players and coaches with an unquenchable thirst to find a game. Any game. “The great thing was you only had guys that loved to play,” he claims. “No one did it just for themselves, just for the money. They loved being part of the game.”
An Auspicious Start
Continue reading Got Game, Will Travel
