San Fernando Valley FC awaits its closeup

For Cristo Deras, soccer was therapeutic. And it might have altered his future path.

Deras, 21, is the striker and the leading returning scorer for San Fernando Valley FC, which earned promotion from the United Professional Soccer League’s Division I to its Premier division this season and in a week will make its debut in the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, this country’s oldest soccer tournament and one that encompasses all levels from semipro to Major League Soccer.

SFVFC (1-1 this season going into a Saturday league match against Culver City FC) will face Escondido FC next Wednesday at 2:45 p.m. at the Sepulveda Basin Sports Complex in Encino in a first-round match of the 107th edition of the U.S. Open Cup, which returns after a two-year COVID-19 hiatus.

If SFVFC gets by Escondido, it will play the California United Strikers FC of the National Independent Soccer Association on April 17 at Great Park in Irvine. A victory there and a third-round match with an MLS club might result, and that would be a tall achievement for the six-year-old club.

It would be unanticipated visibility for players like Deras, for whom the game has already provided a reason to persevere.

Both of his parents have struggled with addiction and mental health issues. He was in and out of the foster care system when he was younger, has leaned on his sisters for support and vice versa, and has been living with a supportive family that took him in.

He attended Central City Value High, a charter school in Los Angeles. At 16, after he’d drifted away from soccer for a few months, he realized how much the game meant to him.

“Not doing anything, staying home, being depressed,” he said, describing what he’d lapsed into in a recent Zoom interview. “I stopped working out. I just threw myself at video games. I’d just be there playing, laying down on my bed, not doing anything, not even getting out of the house and just being in my own world.

“I didn’t notice it back then, but it’s like something (was) missing. I needed to do something. I always questioned myself: Do I need a therapist, do I need this or that?”

At one point during that malaise, a friend invited him to play futsal, a miniaturized form of the game more akin to indoor soccer.

“I started playing and then I felt this emptiness just started filling up, you know?” he said. “I was with my friends, we were having fun. … That’s when I realized, like, I want to keep doing this. That’s my only therapeutic thing to do.”

Deras did not come up through the pay-to-play club team system that is the foundation of U.S. youth soccer, and maybe that was to his benefit even if it didn’t seem so at the time. He played four seasons of high school soccer and also ran cross country, and he had two goals and three assists in 15 games for a 2019 El Camino College soccer team that came within one game of reaching the state’s Final Four.

“It was very tough mentally for me” to step up in competition, he said. “I didn’t play club. … I played pickup games with my friends. I trained on my own. I played just high school, basically. And to go make it to a college made me realize I can actually (go) further. But it was really hard for me to transition from there because I didn’t have any exposure. No one knew me. I had to make a name for myself at that college.

“It was really hard because everyone there had been scouted by the coach, and I was the only one that made it from the tryout.”

From there, with the help of coach/mentor Hank Ramirez, Deras had a tryout with another UPSL side and then landed with San Fernando Valley FC after a two-day audition. He had 13 goals and five assists last fall, as SFVFC won the UPSL’s SoCal North Division I without a loss to earn promotion to the organization’s Premier Division and also won two U.S. Open Cup regional qualifiers – 2-1 over SC Trojans FC, a USC club team, and 2-1 over Capo FC – to get into the national tournament’s main draw.

Possibilities have opened that Deras probably couldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago. He was one of three SFVFC players offered tryouts by the Argja Bóltfelag club in the Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the northeast Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway that is a self-governing part of Denmark. Jasper Macht already tried out for that club, was not picked up but landed with Tvøroyar Bóltfelag, also part of the Faroese Premier League. Deras and Charlie Cazares will audition for Argja Bóltfelag later this year.

“It’s (because of) a former Danish professional player (Jonas Dal Andersen, sporting director at Argja),” assistant coach Kyle Keenan said. “He’s really interested in bringing American talent over because he feels like it’s an untapped market and he wants to bring them over to his club, and then from there kind of develop them and then sell them on to clubs in the continent, in Europe.”

It’s all part of a team’s growth. SFVFC founder and head coach Carlos Cortez, his wife Christine Lam – the CEO, and the one who handles the lion’s share of administrative details in addition to holding a full-time job of her own – and assistant coach Keenan are toiling to build something sustainable from a business standpoint, the better to provide more opportunities for “the next Cristo and for kids from our community,” Keenan said.

For now, the crowds they get at the Sepulveda Basin are mainly family-and-friends sized. Win a couple of U.S. Open Cup matches, get some exposure on ESPN+ and possibly get a shot at an MLS team down the line, and who knows what the eventual rewards could be?