Fondy had his best season as a pro in Louisville, Kentucky, after being released by the Fire. He finished the 2015 USL season as the league’s MVP and top-scorer. And still with dreams of a place in the U.S. National Team and, eventually, a return to MLS, Fondy made a decision he regrets.
“If I was making choices based on the love of the game, and where I was happy, I would have stayed in Kentucky,” he said. “But I didn’t.”
No matter how short his stay, a door opened in Louisville that would forever change Fondy’s life – and the lives of so many kids in Oakland. “I did an appearance that really inspired there, at a refugee ministry,” he recalled. “We were using the game of soccer to connect with kids. Their English wasn’t great, but we all spoke the language of soccer.”
A New Road Ahead
He saw “the power of the game to connect communities.” At his next stop as a pro, in North Carolina, he started his own program working with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.
Bouncing from club to club, he also saw the challenges some of his teammates faced as they scraped out a living in the game. “I was able to access soccer, pay the fees, get the transportation and the cleats as a kid,” he said of his own experience. “But the stories of some of my teammates, from Honduras and Nigeria, or who grew up under apartheid in South Africa – they opened my eyes.”
Fondy started making use of his spare time. “I wasn’t a great student in college but I wanted to dig into things deeper,” he said. “I started taking classes and studying. It became a passion.”
But there’s a problem here. The more Oakland Genesis becomes what he calls the “kind of resource we want to be,” the less Fondy can be out on the field.
“I’m still hanging on,” said Fondy, who insists on coaching one of the boys’ academy teams while slowly being dragged indoors in his role as Genesis’ chief fund-rasier and co-executive director.
He just can’t imagine a weekend without a game. A chance to take aim at a goal. And you can just see it, the wheels turning in his head to a future where it all might come together in a perfect symmetry.
“It’s not too far off. An Oakland Genesis team in the Open Cup? Absolutely,” said Fondy with a big grin. “Once these kids grow up a little and, hopefully I’m not too old, I’ll play with them.
You get the sense he means it too.
Fontela is editor-in-chief of usopencup.com. Follow him at @jonahfontela on X/Twitter.
