This past June, Killer Kleats, a competitive adult men’s soccer team in the Triangle Adult Soccer League, won the silver medal in the 2006 State Games of North Carolina.
With its win at the 2006 State Games, the largest multisport event ever held in North Carolina, Killer Kleats qualified to represent North Carolina at the State Games of America in Colorado Springs, Co., in May 2007.
Killer Kleats was started in 2004 by a few N.C State students looking to play more competitive soccer than just pickup games or intramurals. The team, with 14 out of 25 players being State students, has achieved a great deal of success in a short period of time, according to Hakan Efe, a graduate student in electrical engineering and one of the founding members of the team.
“We first started in C division, and in our first season we won nine out of 10 games and won the division, so we were promoted to division B,” Efe said. “We then won all 10 games in B and were promoted to division A.”
The men’s open division of the TASL is divided into three different divisions, with A being the most challenging and competitive. Killer Kleats was the first team to move from division C to division A in just two seasons.
Last season, the Killer Kleats’ first time in division A, proved to be more difficult than the other two divisions.
“Our first season in A we ended up doing OK — finishing ranked fifth,” Efe said. “This season we added some new players and now we are ranked second.”
One of those new players, Brent West, a senior in construction engineering, decided to play for Killer Kleats because of the more competitive nature of the team.
“The team I played with before, they didn’t have practices in between the games, and I am not really big on going to games and not [having] practices,” West said. “Killer Kleats has practices two times a week and then one time a week during the season, and I would rather be with a team than practices every week so I can get better.”
Graham Auten, a senior in civil engineering who has been with the team for almost a year, enjoys the higher level of talent in the league.
“All the players in the league have played competitive soccer for their entire life. They know what it is about, they know how to play hard, they know what to do; it is not like intramurals, this is actually competitive,” Auten said.
“We play against teams all across the state that are competitive, they all have varsity players from colleges like N.C State.”
Despite the greater level of competition, Killer Kleats shares a lot of similarities with a club team.
“We are not only like a soccer team but we are like a club. We have a team manager who organizes all the games and sends out all the e-mails and gets sponsorships from places like Tallulas in Chapel Hill. He takes care of the organizational stuff and I try to recruit new players,” Efe said.
Alan Petermann, the team’s goalkeeper, said he enjoyed the atmosphere.
“We would use family. That is what the team is. We are a family,” Petermann said.
One of the unique aspects of the team is its diversity, according to Auten.
“We have people from Turkey, Sweden, countries in Africa, Latin America and South America,” Auten said. “For a while we had something like nine languages spoken on the team. There may be a language barrier here or there, but soccer brings us together.”
According to Petermann, soccer is the one thing that transcends any language barrier the team may have.
“You don’t need to speak the same language. We speak the same language for 90 minutes on a 120-by-70 pitch. Soccer is the universal language of this world,” Petermann said. “It just translates the world over.”
