This may be a shocker to folks who know me. 

It’s up there with that first time I smooched my girlfriend in second grade. Scary but pretty nice. 

And it happened on a hot, sunny day last weekend in Thompson Falls, on the green grass of Previs Field. 

Make that the green “pitch”. 

I, Charles K. Bandel, watched and thoroughly enjoyed two high school soccer games. 

Yup, I was scared, but I went for it, and it was pretty nice. 

On that sunny afternoon I watched the Thompson Falls-Plains-St. Regis boys and girls high school varsity soccer teams take to the pitch, as a soccer field is known. 

They were the first high school varsity soccer games in history, as far as I know, for Sanders or Mineral Counties. 

I’ve never had the occasion to become a soccer fan.  I can’t remember any soccer teams, even the youth variety, in Billings as I was growing up.  We had little guy football, the American kind of football, but soccer was something played overseas. 

They called it futbol, which in retrospect is more accurate than calling American football, football.  The feet are involved more in futbol, aka soccer, than they are in football. 

But I grew up with football and baseball. 

It would be years later, during the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles that I saw my first “real” soccer game live.  It was an intense match between France and Yugoslavia, and I think the final score was 2-1. 

That was always the reason I never really got into soccer.  Two-to-one or “nil-nil”, 0-0) was dull to my 35-28 American football mind. 

I readily conceded being a soccer player required amazing athletes.  In the times I played football, I joked that I was an offensive lineman not because I was a big dude, but because I rarely liked running more than 40 yards. 

Soccer players must rack up big time miles each game. 

And I also scoffed at the “injuries” of soccer, where players went down, rolled around, were taken off on a stretcher writhing in “pain”, only to come back into the game minutes later. 

That all changed this past Saturday.  Soccer did not replace football or basketball atop my list of favorite sports, but it moved onto the list. 

These boys and girls, from both the T Falls co-op and their opponents, the Bighorns from Lone Peak (Big Sky, Mt) were without a doubt ready and able to run.  In 90-degree heat and for long stretches at a time. 

But what really amazed me was the intensity on the pitch.  You don’t really see it all on TV or in the stands, but on the sideline, I was privy to seeing some pretty solid collisions.   

The players were going after each other, increasingly so as the game wore on. 

In the end, the boys' teams wound up tied 1-1, while the Lone Peak girls won handily, although T Falls et al, gave them a fight until the end. 

During the game, I found myself standing and pumping my fist several times as the action unfolded before me.  There was intensity galore. 

So, I am adding soccer to my list of sports I like.  American football will always reign supreme in my sports heart, but like Jello, there’s always room for more.