Thetford author Ted MacVeagh has always held an affinity for fantasy stories, yet he wanted to compose something realistic for his debut novel. For that, the London native turned to his favorite sport, soccer, and the trials and triumphs of a small-town, startup travel team in The Blue Marauders.
Intended for 12- to-14-year-old readers who love soccer, the narrative features lots of game description and strategy without skimping on drama and conflict. MacVeagh, 52, engaged in plenty of the former to model the approach he’s observed within other young adult sports novels.
“I wanted to place soccer front and center,” said MacVeagh. “There are a lot of English soccer (novels) where there is a lot of description of the actual games. It’s sort of what moves the narrative along. If you look at a lot of juvenile sports fiction published today, a lot of the ones about, say, basketball or baseball include game descriptions. Some people may want to skim over that stuff, but I think a lot of adults and kids alike find it exciting because they put themselves on the field, in their minds.”
Soccer lovers or not, adult readers will envision themselves back in seventh grade, when weekend days were spent hanging out with friends and who was going out with whom was a subject of endless fodder.
The story’s main protagonists are best friends Nick McCoy and Erik Steiner, 13-year-olds in a fictional town of Lancaster which mirrors Thetford in many ways, from the colonial houses surrounding the common to the quintessential village store and colorful personalities among townsfolk.
McCoy and Steiner decide to start a travel soccer team, the Blue Marauders, to compete in the Tri-State League against the likes of the Thunder — a team loosely modeled after the real-life Norwich-based Lightning Soccer Club. The Thunder are based in fictional Milford, mirroring Hanover from its prestigious college (Milford’s is called Hereford College) and nearby major medical center.
Yet at 45 minutes away, Milford is a bit farther from Lancaster than Hanover is from Thetford, and MacVeagh insists some of the parallels to Upper Valley communities are incidental or unintended.
“I suppose there is a concern that the parallels might be drawn (too strongly), but part of it is enforced by the demands of the narrative,” he said. “There has to be competition for the Blue Marauders, and really any small town in America has a big town somewhat nearby that is sort of the locust of the area. So Lancaster and Milford really aren’t real places, but at the same time they could be anywhere.”
The ambitious boys face myriad dilemmas, at first primarily in the form of what they lack. They have no field to use (the one at the school is already occupied by elementary school programs), no coach and not enough players.
As the boys scheme and toil to get the Blue Marauders afloat, we’re introduced to more characters. Erik’s dad, Larry Steiner, agrees to coach, while the village store owner, Rory Patenaude, and Greek pizzeria proprietor, Georgi, agree to sponsor the team for jerseys (the latter quite reluctantly).
The boys recruit enough players for a team with one or two substitutes, ushering into the story adolescent personalities with varying degrees of soccer interest.
One of the main secondary characters is Abbey, a talented sweeper who must ultimately choose between playing for the girls Thunder team she’d already signed up for and the new, male-dominated team in her hometown. Another is Kenny, a conceited kid from Milford in search of a team after missing the registration deadline for the Thunder.
After a tumultuous first half of the season, we’re introduced to Jan (pronounced “Yan”) Tielemans, a former Dutch national team player and player-coach who lives in Lancaster’s western woods and, at first, has no interest in relieving Larry Steiner as the Blue Marauders’ coach.
After some coaxing, the stern Tielemans helps transform the Blue Marauders into a contender, all the while juggling the politically charged yammerings of jealous opposing coaches.
Both Steiner and Tielemans are subjected to continuous subtle and not-so-subtle threats from coaching colleagues during pre- and post-game exchanges, encounters MacVeagh describes as exaggerative.
“That maybe stems from when I first moved to the U.S. in 1976 and I found that a lot of soccer coaches were former athletic trainers who had the game running through their blood and could be very competitive,” the author said. “The most egregious personalities in the book may have been gleaned from observations I made during those older days. Around places like New York and Boston, you might still see some of that overt competitiveness, where the focus on winning bears too much importance.”
The Blue Marauders also naturally contend with interloping parents, many simply pests. Kenny’s well-heeled father goes over the top after Tielemans changes Kenny’s position, a phenomenon MacVeagh portrays typical real-life struggles.
“There are a lot of difficult conversations between coaches and parents about whether the coach is harming the player’s development by the way they’re being used,” the author said. “Sometimes kids are much too young by the time they’re already saying, ‘I’m a striker’ or, ‘I’m a defender.’ ”
As readers root for the Blue Marauders to improve on the field, subplots include McCoy’s academic struggles — a project about Egyptian mummies issued by the demanding Mr. DeMille proves confounding — and tepid romances between Abbey and Kenny as well as McCoy and the non-soccer-playing Yvonne, who holds a swing-dance party yielding plenty of fireworks.
The Blue Marauders’ improvement under Tielemans borders on fairytale, yet the book avoids the realm of cliche thanks to its unexpected twists and glass-half-full conclusion.
MacVeagh, a full-time writer who self-published The Blue Marauders and is developing manuscripts for three additional works, has produced a lively debut novel that soccer fans young and old will find engaging and heartwarming.
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.