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Collaboration extends to soccer field
Mehrdad Hadighi (left) and Peter Biehl huddle up with their team during a match on a recent Saturday in Delaware Park. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI
This is no academic collaboration.
“Charge, charge, charge!” Peter Biehl, associate professor of anthropology, calls out, as Mehrdad Hadighi, chair of the Department of Architecture, mans the goal against the onslaught. Children in yellow jerseys, two at a time, dribble and pass through the grass, shooting honeycomb-patterned soccer balls at Hadighi. Some of the projectiles soar past the professor’s trim figure, while others are stopped at the mouth of the net.
“Come on, next pair!” Biehl hollers, beckoning the sprinting youngsters like a drill sergeant. “Come!”
At UB, colleagues recognize Biehl and Hadighi for their professional endeavors, including the duo’s recent collaboration on producing an exhibition showcasing a multimillion-dollar collection of artifacts from six continents. But here, on the field in Delaware Park, kids and parents in the Delaware Soccer Club know the two men as “Coach.”
Together, since 2007, Biehl and Hadighi have directed a team whose members include Biehl’s son, Leo, and Hadighi’s son, Dara, both 8. In spring, summer and fall, the faculty members teach boys and girls how to kick, run and score–how to play what Biehl and fans worldwide call “the beautiful game.” The coaches preach teamwork.
The high-energy Biehl and more reserved Hadighi can seem an odd couple. At one recent Wednesday evening practice, Biehl led a flock of children in warm-ups, demonstrating high-knee runs that sent his wavy, shoulder-length hair flying. As he exhorted students to follow him in exercises that included jogging and crossovers, he shouted instructions and offered encouragement, always energetic, always on the move. Hadighi’s style is different: He is equally serious, but much quieter.
“There’s just a quirkiness to the two of them,” says Alan Kegler, a Delaware Soccer Club parent and creative director for University Communications.
But, as Kegler can attest, the professors’ style and coaching strategy works. Though Biehl and Hadighi emphasize learning and having fun over winning, Kegler’s son, Rohnan, 8, recently played against the Biehl-Hadighi squad in a game that Kegler says ended with a score of “eight or 10 to nothing,” with the Biehl-Hadighi crew on top.
“You know your team is in for trouble when you’re in warm-ups against them,” Kegler says. “The way Peter and Mehrdad run them through drills, they do crossovers and different calisthenics drills that none of the children do for the other teams, or not to that level. They do hand drags.”
“Peter and Mehrdad stand out because they were masterful with the soccer ball,” Kegler adds. “Just watching the two of them passing it back and forth to each other, hitting the ball off their shoulder, their knee, their back, they were at a higher level than any other children or adults I had seen out there. It was obvious that they were schooled in a lifetime of soccer.”
Both Biehl and Hadighi grew up playing soccer in foreign countries–Germany and Iran, respectively–and both have deep appreciation for the sport. When asked what inspired them to take up the game when they were young, both men struggle to come up with an answer; where they were born, soccer was a part of life. Everyone played. Do you need a reason?
In his youth, Hadighi lived in Chalus, a northern Iranian city on the Caspian Sea. His childhood memories are filled with the sport.
“In Iran,” he says, “you walk out the door and there are people playing all the time, on the street, on the sidewalk, everywhere. We played in school. We played in recess. We played after school. All you need is a plastic ball that we used to get for a nickel. That’s all you need, and you can have a game.”
When Hadighi became chair of the architecture department in 2005, he asked students and faculty members to join him to play on Friday afternoons, hoping soccer could be an antidote to what he calls a “huge problem” at the university: a lack of social space, especially on the South Campus, for casual meetings.
“Every school where I’ve ever been, there’s been a café or a ping pong table, or something where you can work with other people and sit or have lunch, talk about who you are, what you do. Certainly, here in our school at South Campus, there’s nothing,” Hadighi says. “Students and faculty only see each other in this structured environment. So soccer gives us a way to see each other in a slightly different environment. I encourage students to come and kick with their faculty.”
Now, in spring and in the early part of the fall semesters, about 30 students and instructors show up to take part in weekly games. And that is the magic of soccer: its ability to bring people together.
Biehl is from Mondorf, a German village on the border with France and Luxembourg. There, he says, church and soccer were the “only thing to do.” He joined teams at school, traveled as a member of a regional league when he got older, and earned certification as a sports instructor. When he left home to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, he found comfort in pubs and cafés where friends and strangers talked excitedly about the game.
Later, in 2006, while on the faculty of Cambridge University in England, Biehl returned to soccer again, this time at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in Turkey. Archaeologists and anthropologists had long been working at the site’s West Mount, and Biehl and a group of associates had recently opened an East Mount dig. Biehl arranged a friendly competition: an East Mount-versus-West Mount soccer game that has become an annual summer tradition. The event unites researchers from varied backgrounds, including men and women and Turks and Western Europeans. Locals unaffiliated with the excavation participate, too.
Today, through coaching and other means, Biehl is passing the tradition of soccer on to his children. When his daughter, Olivia, turns 5 in the fall, he plans to teach her how to play. Every Saturday, Biehl and his son, Leo, get on the phone or Skype with Biehl’s father, still in Germany, and bet on the outcome of games. Then, on Sunday morning, to find out the weekend’s results, Biehl and Leo watch soccer wrap-ups on Sportschau–the same program Biehl watched in his youth, back in Mondorf.
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