My name is Mycah Kraushaar. I coached Lopez soccer for six years, beginning in 2019 with  middle schoolers and having the privilege to move up to coaching varsity alongside them.  

I played soccer my whole life. While I never had the intention of it becoming a career, I  absolutely loved it. It gave me a way to connect with my peers and maintain physical  fitness and taught me so much about being a teammate and a leader. Because of where I  grew up, I had access to my sport year-round. Club teams in the spring and summer, an  indoor team in the winter, meaning more opportunities for advancing but also meaning  consistent access to an activity that kept me happy and healthy. 

Lopez students are special in the way they connect to eachother and represent their  community through athletics, and the lack of facilities or club teams doesn’t change this.  What it does change is their access to the sort of programs that pave the way for  opportunities beyond high school, the ones that semiprofessional and college coaches  look for.  

I absolutely loved my coaching position, but the lack of funding and community resources  made it incredibly difficult at times. We “maintained” our own facilities, manually watering  the field when allowed access to the pump, ziptied the holes in the nets, painted our own  shed. The community soccer group was immensely helpful with this, hosting bunny-hole filling parties and coming to practices as “guest coaches” when I needed the help. As a  varsity coach, I was paid around half of the stipend of Friday Harbor coaches. My assistant  coach, a parent, didn’t receive a stipend at all up until this last year, something The Pack  was able to help with. I loosely did the math one year- factoring the 12 hour off island days,  it averaged out to about $2.15 per hour. The booster club should be able to focus on the  fundraising events they put on, the merchandise they design and the concessions they are  able to provide- not funding a coaching staff. 

In the 2023 season, I had around forty students signed up for soccer. Lopez doesn’t make  cuts, but we also didn’t have a junior varsity team in the budget. The solution? My assistant  coach and I splitting up the teams and essentially running two practices at once. It  doubled the labor and, honestly, compromised the experience of the students pretty  drastically. All this while also being the interim athletic director and trying to support the  students who were looking to play soccer in college. We didn’t have a camera for game  film, nor anyone to do the filming. The support of The Pack, parents, and community  soccer were the only reason we were able to get new game balls, nets, uniforms for  Lopez’s first ever girl’s soccer team, hold senior night celebrations etc.  

This is not sustainable, and without a longer-term solution Lopez will cease to have athletics available for students, which would truly be a tragedy. Anyone who was part of 

the team- player, coach, spectator or other- watched the ways the young people on the  field grew alongside eachother. The lessons they learned about being one part of a whole,  asking for and offering support, leadership, work/life balance, respect and so on are the  undeniable positives of school athletics when there are the resources to create that  container. A Parks and Recreation department is truly the only visible way forward.