Soccer With A Bite
Vipers’ high-scoring indoor game making a run in Omaha
By John Fey
Omaha continues to make great strides as a sports town. How so, you ask? Well, look at how the Omaha Nighthawks took off during their inaugural season. Just a few weeks before the Nighthawks opened their season last fall came the announcement that Omaha would land a professional indoor soccer team.
The Major Indoor Soccer League announced last August that Omaha would become the fifth member and play at the Civic Auditorium.
“This is truly an exciting time for the MISL with the addition of a new team in Omaha,” MISL Commissioner David Grimaldi said in the press release that accompanied the announcement. “The Midwest is proving to be a strong area for MISL expansion and fits our long-term business model very well as we regionalize our league during the next few years of growth.”
Principal owner Frank Onate said back then that the time was right for professional soccer in Omaha.
“I have been saying for years that Omaha has the fans to support a higher-level team,” Onate said, “and now we have it.”
So the Omaha Vipers were launched as the fifth MISL team. The others are the Baltimore Blast, Milwaukee Wave, Kansas City Comets and Chicago Riot.
The first order of business for Onate and his other owners was hiring a coach. They chose Marcelo Fontana, who starred with Milwaukee and is on the active Vipers roster.
Fontana then assembled his first team. He made the wise move to add three well-known college players – Ryan Junge and Johnny Torres from Creighton and Eduardo “Lalo” Suarez from Bellevue University.
Junge was an all-conference performer, and Suarez earned All-America status with the Bruins. But the headline player was Torres, who was the 1997 college player of the year and CU’s only two-time All-American.
Despite missing two of the Vipers’ 13 games, Torres has racked up 23 points, second-best on the team. Junge ranks sixth with 12 points.
Forward Carlos Farias leads the Vipers with 48 points and entered the week tied for second in the MISL. Farias’ play in December earned him the MISL player-of-the-month award.
Indoor soccer is, obviously, a much faster and high-scoring game compared to the outdoor version. The artificial-turf field is the size of a hockey rink with dasher boards and Plexiglas all around. Each game consists of four 15-minute quarters.
Unique to the sport is that all goals are worth two points, and goals scored from on or beyond a 45-foot arc surrounding the goals counts for three points. An average of 11 goals are scored in a game.
The Vipers head into Friday’s home game against Chicago in third place, 4½ games behind league-leading Baltimore and 2½ games ahead of fourth-place Kansas City. Milwaukee entered the week trailing Baltimore by one game.
Only three teams will make the playoffs, which makes Omaha’s final seven games crucial. Postseason play begins the week after the regular season’s March 13 finish.
So how well has Omaha embraced professional indoor soccer? Frankly, not so well. The vipers rank fourth with an average of 3,369 over the first seven home games. Baltimore leads the league (6,680 for six games), well ahead of Kansas City (4,039 for eight games). Somewhat surprising, Chicago is last with an average of 1,271 over four games.
With the huge growth of youth soccer in Omaha, it’s a little perplexing why the Vipers aren’t drawing better crowds. Perhaps the interest in Creighton basketball, UNO hockey and Omaha Lancers hockey is hurting the Vipers’ gate.
The Vipers played on Super Bowl Sunday against the Mexican national team in a makeup of a December postponement. The amateurs blasted the Vipers 23-13 before 3,032 at the Civic.
The Mexican roster included Omahan Manuel Lira, who plays for Bellevue University. He was called into action because the Mexicans were short players.
Torres and Fabio “Fabinho” Ribeiro each scored twice for the Vipers in the game that Fontana told the World-Herald was entertaining. But the coach said there’s much to be done if the Vipers are to make the playoffs.
“I told the guys that it was going to be a fun game,” Fontana said, “but we’ve got to take it like it’s another game that we’ve got to work to get better.”