Adoring Andy

“We’re more than eagles, we soar even higher!”

You might expect such a team motto, inscribed on the patch of their uniform sleeves, to befit a boys’ youth soccer squad known as FC Aviators. And needless to say, when a boisterous bunch like these kids are based in an historic aviation city such as Wichita, Kansas, well, of course, you’d just expect them to naturally soar even higher on the pitch, right?

Well, maybe not, if you asked their coach going way back to their little shaver days of Under 8 rec league before ultimately reaching the pinnacle of the Dallas Cup well into their middle school years at the Under 14 elite select level. Andy Founder is about as local as they come, and many of the FC Aviators’ fathers remember his phenom reputation on their city’s fields and beyond to his playing days at Wichita State.

What nobody knows about this coach called Andy, greatly loved and endlessly followed by his players, but increasingly seen as overly ethical and uncompromisingly patient by some of his parents in the bleachers, is what Mr. Founder really adores. You won’t find it in his team pep talks, and he didn’t learn it when he attained his elite US Soccer National A Coaching Badge long before his peers and right after his twenty-fifth birthday, nonetheless.

Yet if you are up long before dawn, day after day and year after year, in the back pew of his parish Perpetual Adoration chapel, dressed for his day job and with the FC Aviators’ gear in the trunk prepped for their after work practices and games, Coach Andy would show you who was the eternally soaring source of his true adoration.

Through more “first hours of the day” than humanly fathomable, the truly adored one spoke to the FC Aviators’ coach, and the FC Aviators’ coach would speak in silence to his truly adored one. To say that the two of them had much to say to each other would be quite the understatement, since the Adored One knew all of Andy—and far more than his players and certainly their parents did.

Going to Williamsport author, former Marquette University varsity soccer player, and fifteen-year select youth soccer coach Rich Agnello brings all this adoration to the forefront—both spiritual and human, as well as aspirational and profoundly flawed—in his latest novel Adoring Andy. In a cacophony of voices, each of the FC Aviators tell their team’s story and their admiration for their coach over the years, one little kid player at a time, and one season at a time as they grow up from little boys into not-so-little young adolescents.
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As joyful children’s voices slowly but surreptitiously self-destruct into internal tumult across the FC Aviators’ sideline, and as their competitive landscape devolves into irreconcilable toxicity, perhaps none of those twenty-five dads, moms, and guardians will remember Andy Founder as the adored one, even after all those years with their little ones.

But their sons will forever adore him, even after his unexpected resignation from their team, and over time they will realize the one who Coach Andy really adores. One of these former players along with his father—both raised as atheists over two generations—will eventually join that “first hour of the day” with him when their now ex-coach least expects it.

Adoring Andy promises to redefine what a flight plan for our lives and our ultimate destinies can be and should be for all of us, as well as where that path of perpetually adoring must lead us.

In a culture like ours that perversely contorts what we need to adore for our supposed true happiness, it is Rich Agnello’s hope that Coach Andy Founder’s path re-finds in all of us the real upward destination for our soaring even higher salvation.