Event organizer Kevin Kaye of OnTrack Sport Center in Tarrytown keeps track of players during the 34-hour indoor soccer game, which finally ended yesterday morning with the White team ahead of the Black team 623-450. (Stuart Bayer/The Journal News)
TARRYTOWN - I was feeling kind of tired, having fallen asleep during Game 3 of the World Series, and being jolted awake by the alarm clock before 6 a.m. yesterday.
Two coffees, a quick shower, then a ride to OnTrack Sport Center in Tarrytown, and as soon as I walked through the door I felt like the Energizer Bunny and Speedy Gonzalez rolled into one.
Because the people inside OnTrack made my five-plus hours of sleep seem Rip Van Winklian.
They had been up since some point Friday, most of them since early Friday morning, with only a couple of tiny cat naps in sleeping bags on the center's cold artificial turf. The 22 of them - two women, 20 men - had just completed a record-breaking 34-hour indoor soccer game at 7:30 a.m. yesterday. They had topped the Guinness World Record for an indoor soccer game - 30 hours - at 3:30 a.m. and tacked on another four hours. Guinness has to review it and authenticate it, which will take two to six weeks.
Final score: White 623, Black 450.
It might have been closer, but the Black lost two players, one to a back injury and one who quit - "He should be ashamed of himself," said Aniello Ricchiuti of Sleepy Hollow, who played for the winning team.
Plus, the sides were chosen somewhat blindly.
"The difficult thing about this was we had 30-40 inquiries and requests to play, and when it came down to crunch time, we had so many people back out, either inexplicably or came up with ridiculous excuses," said Kevin Kaye of Briarcliff, the president/general manager of OnTrack Sport Center who had been planning the event since the spring of 2007.
"At the end, everybody was hugging and cheering, and just as close as you could be on any team. It was great."
The Red Bulls sent their "Street Team" over to perform ball skills during the kickoff reception Friday, and at the end of the game yesterday, Red Bulls player Carlos Mendes showed up to congratulate the teams.
"I appreciate what you guys have done," Mendes told them. "I play 90 minutes and I'm exhausted."
The event benefitted the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Though still being tabulated, the goal was to raise enough, at least, to grant a wish for a seriously ill child (average cost of a wish: $7,500).
"I knew that it had to be tied to something bigger than just the event," Kaye said. "Yeah, it was a big thing to do - any time you break a world record, everybody thinks it's a big deal - but I wanted to have more of a purpose attached to it. I felt it would motivate people to work even harder because it was for a good cause."
On Friday night, a Make-A-Wish kid who'd had a wish granted, a young girl named Jody from Rockland (the foundation doesn't identify kids) who had 38 surgeries and lost both legs, addressed the participants.
"You can't not look at these kids and think about what Make-A-Wish does for them and not be moved, and not realize how lucky you are," said player Tom Schumacher of Sleepy Hollow. "I've got two healthy kids. Amen. I found myself getting a little choked up, but it's a good feeling."
So they began, with rules and regs set by Guinness. There would be no more than 24 players (five per team on the field at any time), and players couldn't switch sides. For every hour played, five minutes' worth of break could be accumulated. Nobody was allowed to leave and come back. Local sponsors provided food. The pace early was frantic.
"It was funny because it took a good 15 minutes before the first goal was scored, and in indoor (soccer) that's pretty amazing," Schumacher said.
They almost finished themselves before they had really even begun.
"In the beginning, we actually foolishly played a little harder than we should have," Ricchiuti said, "We slowed it down. We had no choice."
"Nobody wanted to give up that first goal," Kaye said. "The ironic thing is that the tempo didn't slow down until four or five hours later, and at that point the players realized, 'Wow, I better slow down because I'm feeling tired, and we haven't even gone four or five hours yet.' So the goals started coming then."
There were also moments of truth. One was Friday night/Saturday morning, when Kaye said there was "an absolute, across-the-board fear that we weren't going to do it, because it occurred to them that we hadn't even put a dent in the record yet and we still had a whole night to go through, and they were dragging."
So they had a meeting during a break. Should we keep on going, or walk away right now? The answer was an "unequivocal 'No, we're going for this,' " Kaye said.
Another tough time was the 15-hour mark, when they realized they were only halfway home.
"It was definitely not as easy as just talking about it," Kaye said.
Schumacher was posting a chronicle of the marathon on Facebook, and received an e-mail from the commissioner of the AYSO in which he coaches both his son's and his daughter's teams. It said, "Great job. Good stuff. Now wake up and go coach your two teams." So he hoped to get a hot bath and then go for two more games.
"What's that they say?" Schumacher said. "You sleep when you're dead, right?"
Kaye said he planned to be sleeping, "as soon as I can get out of my car and make it to my floor.
"The thing that was most important to me is that the guys and women who were on this field, some of whom had never met, worked so hard for something, and came together, and were on the brink of what I consider to be a walk-away failure. It sounds maybe a little silly ... but really that was much more important to me than (the record). And even more important was the cause we were doing it for, Make-A-Wish."
There was pride and satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, on their weary faces, even as they limped out of the place, many complaining of aches and pains.
As they did, Mendes, the pro athlete, warned them, "Wait 'til tomorrow."
Reach Rick Carpiniello at rcarpini@lohud.com.
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