Santa Ana Soccer Program Has Roots in Turkey

It was a promise made in 1951 in a high school classroom in Istanbul that led to this year being the 40th anniversary of soccer on the Santa Ana College campus.

A visiting Santa Ana instructor, speaking to a group of students, said Santa Ana would do everything possible to help any student enrolled at the college halfway around the world.

Ertuvan Kanatsiz, who started the soccer program at Santa Ana, was sitting in that classroom in Turkey. The idea of traveling appealed to him. He had dreamed of coming to the United States because of movies he had seen.

In the next six years, he completed high school, where he took seven classes in French and seven in Turkish, and served in the military.

Kanatsiz arrived in the United States in 1956 and started classes at Santa Ana in the fall of 1957. He was 23.

Forty years later, Kanatsiz, now 64, is a retired high school French teacher and soccer coach who still teaches French part time at Santa Ana College.

“Those were good days,” he said of arriving on campus. “Everybody helped us.”

The soccer team started out as a collection of foreign students who formed the International club. “When I first came here,” Kanatsiz said, “I could barely speak a word of English and the others were just like me. We gravitated toward soccer because we all had that in common.”

Kanatsiz, who lived with a family near campus, was the player-coach when the team started its first official year of competition in 1958. Team members were given football jerseys and put on a demonstration of the sport at an assembly in an effort to introduce the world’s game to Santa Ana.

Santa Ana, which is believed to be the first two-year college in the state to have soccer, played in the Southern California Soccer Assn. against four-year colleges that included UCLA, UC Riverside, Redlands and Caltech.

The Dons were 5-1-2 the first year and had a chance to win the conference championship but lost to UCLA, 2-0, in the final game of the season. The team played at the Santa Ana Stadium and didn’t charge admission, but raised money for officials by having the players’ girlfriends pass a hat.

The season concluded with the team being invited to the school’s fall athletic banquet. The athletic director and legendary track coach John Ward sent Kanatsiz and the team a letter of congratulations.

Ward wrote: “Most of us had never seen a soccer match before so it was a new and interesting experience to watch your team in action. Judging from the comments that were made, there will be increasing interest on the part of the students and the community in soccer.”

Kanatsiz played and coached a second year at Santa Ana, then transferred to Long Beach State, where he graduated in 1962 with a degree in French.

He started his teaching career in the Orange Unified School District that same year. He has coached soccer on the junior high and high school level. He also coached men’s soccer at Chapman from 1973 to 1975.

Kanatsiz, who is married and has two adult children, and his family return to Turkey every four or five years, but he’s thankful for the opportunities afforded him since coming to the United States.

“The breaks came my way,” he said. “I can not say enough about this country. I don’t care what people say, if you work hard, you can go as far as you want.”