Longtime rec. coach and volunteer known for siphoning soggy fields
June 2009: The college-bound Thunder celebrate final rec. game after 27 seasons with coaches Harry Jaffe (l.) & Paul Koring (r.)
All good streaks must come to an end. So it is with the 27-season coaching streak of Paul Koring. With his daughter, Nell, graduating with her teammates from DC Stoddert Soccer last spring and his son, Ben, concentrating on SAT prep this fall, Paul has decided to hang up the coaching cleats, put away his paint wand, and retire his garden hose—so we won’t be seeing his familiar face and trademark pink polo shirt on the sidelines this fall. Consistently one of DC Stoddert’s top volunteers, Paul’s contributions were officially recognized with a 2005 Volunteer of the Year—and appreciated by coaches, fellow commissioners, League administrators, and players year after year.
Paul began coaching in DC Stoddert in the spring of 1996 for Nell’s coed U-5 team, the Red Hearts. Two years later, when Ben started playing, Paul added the new U-5 Raptors to his coaching responsibilities. “When as a complete soccer neophyte, I first faced a coed team of Murch kindergarten kids in 1996,” Paul recently wrote, “I had no idea it would run this long or be this rewarding.”
In addition to coaching two teams, Paul made several tours as commissioner, fields volunteer, and go-to scheduler for his children’s divisions. As commissioner in both coed and girls-only divisions, he was active in Stoddert’s efforts to reach out to and incorporate teams from such community soccer organizations as
DC Scores and
City FC, as well as public and charter school teams from Columbia Heights and DC neighborhoods. “Paul probably did more than any rec commissioner to welcome teams from across DC to join the League,” says Board Chair
David Sarley.
Playing for "fun and friendship." The Red Hearts merged with the Cheetahs to form the Thunder, which finished their 27-season run last spring as most of the players graduated high school and went off to college. Co-coached by
Harry Jaffe (photo: left), who also ended a 27-season coaching streak last spring, Thunder dominated the Girls High School division for the last few seasons and represented the best of DC Stoddert recreational soccer. While some of the girls played on travel teams at times and many played for their high schools, it is a testament to Paul and Harry that many played all the way from kindergarten through high school on their Stoddert rec team—“longer than most people play on any team in any sport,” Paul notes. They played for fun and friendship.
Co-coaches Harry & Paul
Holder of a USSF D coaching license, Paul also coached his son Ben’s Raptors from U5 into high school, a 23-season run that outlasted all other teams in his age cohort. As co-commissioner, Paul helped organize what was for many years DC Stoddert’s largest coed rec division. He pioneered a system to tier as many as 36 teams to ensure better match-ups while enforcing DC Stoddert’s three-goal rule. Coaches grew used to receiving E-mails from far-flung locations—Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, or the Balkans—as Paul carried out his commissioner duties while traveling in his role as Washington correspondent for The Globe and Mail.
Koring Siphon. Paul’s name lives in Stoddert lore through the “Koring Siphon,” the technique he developed to use a garden hose to drain soccer fields from Meadowbrook to Sligo Creek to Carter Barron to Takoma. Paul’s diligence in field preparation—whether draining standing water or filling holes with mulch—ensured that his divisions played on many Saturdays when other divisions were forced to sit out.
Even with 27 Stoddert seasons under his belt, Paul believes that he made his greatest coaching discovery early in his career. “The single most important thing I ever said as a coach in that entire time was when—part-way through the first season—I stumbled on the considerable value of having the entire team ‘point to the goal where we want to score,’” Paul wrote recently. “Reducing that confusion gave us a massive advantage in U5, which I believe carried over for many seasons.”
---by Sarah Ducich and Mike McNamee
posted 10/2/09 by MCL
