By Arina Mariia Polishchuk
This season, the Adelphi soccer men’s team gave a warm welcome to Ethan Lager, an 18-year-old freshman from Midwood High School in Brooklyn. Growing up in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, he watched his Ukrainian immigrant community rebuild their lives after Hurricane Sandy devastated the neighborhood. Now, as a freshman center-back and member of the Honors College, Lager channels those lessons into his dual passions: excelling on the soccer field and preparing for a medical career.
Lager started his soccer career at just three years old. His Ukrainian immigrant parents signed him up for a soccer club in South Brooklyn that Eastern European families managed. Dynamite Youth Soccer Club provided Lager not only with athletic skills but also with the community.
In middle school, Lager switched to a Dutch Total Soccer Club to elevate his play level. Even though another company bought out the club, the coaches remained. Lager has now been playing with them for eight years.
However, his soccer path became professional when he joined Football Club Copa Academy in New Jersey. “They introduced me to a pre-professional pathway called the USL Academy. And that was really where I made the jump,” said Lager. “And I decided, okay, I want to play at the next level. I want to play in college.”
“So I really have been playing for two clubs my whole life because I was very loyal. They always told me like, stick with me and it'll go well. And I always trusted them [clubs] and they worked out well, so I'm happy.”
Lager chose Adelphi University because he could play soccer, study to become a doctor and be close to his family. “I fell in love with the school once I did the visit,” he said. “Once I got offered to play on the soccer team here, I knew that this was somewhere I could succeed.”
Lager has been a center-back since early childhood. Center-backs prevent the opposing team from scoring by defending the goal. This position requires skills in tackling, positioning, and reading the game to neutralize the attack. These are skills men’s soccer head coach Gary Book said Lager has.
“Ethan has tremendous athletic, raw ability. His height, strength, speed are all towards the top of the percentiles. He's very technical. He's good with the ball, which suits our style of play that we have here at Adelphi.”
Book added, “But I think the major asset which stuck out against literally so many thousands of other players that we look at was he's a very, very intelligent young man. Sometimes academic intelligence doesn't transfer to athletic intelligence. But in Ethan's case, he's very perceptive about what's going on around him, how he fits into that. And we play what could be described as an intellectual brand of soccer. And Ethan is very quick with his intellect and will become a strong asset.”
Although Lager is dedicated to being a student athlete, he said his primary goal is to become a doctor. “I played soccer, but I always knew that I wanted to be a doctor. That's always been my thing,” said Lager, who is majoring in neuroscience.
His dream is to become an orthopedic surgeon with a specialization in sports medicine. Lager said that he is also interested in pain management because he had long-term injuries. He has broken his ankle, and on two separate occasions, torn multiple ligaments in the same ankle. Even though it doesn’t directly affect his soccer career, he still must take care of it and be attentive. Additionally, Lager knows a lot of athletes with chronic pain. Because he experienced it firsthand, he wants to help others to treat the pain properly in the future.
“It can be so mentally debilitating to the point where you fall out of love with the sport that you were so passionate about,” said Lager. “If you're not able to play the same, if you're not able to be a part of it [sport] in the same way because of the injury.”
Working in a team and helping others is natural for Lager. He grew up with six siblings in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. This neighborhood is home to a higher concentration of people with Ukrainian and Russian ancestry than almost any other neighborhood in the US. For Lager, community and family always come first. He said these people were always there for each other and it had a tremendous impact on Lager’s upbringing.
In 2012, hurricane Sandy destroyed Lager’s house in Sheepshead Bay and left thousands of other people from his community homeless as well. They lost everything but their faith. The then 6-year-old boy quickly learned how important it is to help each other. He saw how his parents were helping to rebuild the neighborhood and support people from their surroundings, even though his family had no place to live for a long time.
“It just made me want to be a part of the community and especially help with the communities that I'm in…it's everybody from my culture, it's everybody from my family, basically,” said Lager of his Ukrainian community. “I have cousins there. I have siblings. And it's going out and being able to help them, even though we were struggling ourselves financially, not having a home for a very long time, it became such a big part of who I was integrating.”
Team sports is his other community and it requires compromises and communication between the team members. Lager thinks that putting his team’s performance above his own is important to achieve the common goal.
His Adelphi’s soccer teammate Brandon Carchipulla, a freshman finance major, said, “Ethan shows many leadership qualities, especially for the position he plays, which is very important for his aspect of play. I can probably speak for the whole team that we believe Ethan will be a very influential player.”
Carchipulla added, “He shows a lot of ability within his playstyle, as well as in our training sessions, and he really tries to show a big leadership aspect within the team, setting an example of what other freshmen and players should be doing.”
Leadership skills allow Lager to give back. He is coaching little kids on Long Island. “I work with Jared Soccer Association, which is owned by the town of Jericho. And then the same thing with Plainview, and we function as more professional coaches,” said Lager.
Many of these towns on Long Island lack professional soccer coaches. Instead, coaching is often done by volunteer parents, who are either former college soccer players or played soccer at a high level. Along with other Adelphi soccer players who coach at the Jericho Soccer Association, their goal is to inspire a love for soccer in the children.
“A lot of the kids I work with, I love them there.” Lager said. “I haven't been working with them for that long, only a couple months now. But I think of them like my little brothers at this point, just because of the way that I'm able to help them grow. And I see their development. The best part of it is when they're asking me to come to their games and watch their games, even if I'm not coaching them.”
For Lager the three most important values are resilience, community and education. “The biggest one [value] for me would be resilience, pushing through obstacles. There's so many people who are so talented, and they will hit a roadblock and they'll just stop. It's so difficult to see, and I just want to make sure I never do that.”
“Two, definitely community, family, friends, whoever you can keep around you. I think that's what makes you who you are more than anything else.”
“The value of education, whether it's through school or whether it's through other means, being able to learn and always being able to be open minded. I struggle with that for sure. When somebody gives me criticism or they're trying to teach me something, it's hard to take that in. But I think at the end of the day, every single piece of criticism or education that you can absorb is so valuable because it's just a different perspective.”
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