By Mike Woitalla
Executive Editor, Soccer America Magazine

The gathering of the nation's top teen talent at this summer's adidas ESP scouting and player development event demonstrated the diversity of America's young soccer stars.

James Jaramillo (Orem, Utah)
SOCCER WITH FOOTBALL DAD
Jaramillo's father, a 6-foot-5, 250-pound defensive tackle for the BYU squad that Jim McMahon quarterbacked, never pressured him to pick up the oval ball. Instead, Jim signed his son up for an indoor soccer league when James was 5. And, although Jim didn't have any soccer background (despite his Mexican heritage), he played soccer daily with his son. ''We dribbled, passed the ball back and forth,'' James Jr., says. ''We did some conditioning with the ball. I loved it.'' In 2003, he scored four goals in a game for the Utah state team and he was selected to the Region IV team, which he would captain. He remembers being the only Utah boy picked for a regional team that year. Now Utah sends more than 10 boys annually to Region IV teams. ''You have to mention how much Utah soccer has improved,'' says the 17-year-old who's headed to UCLA in 2006.

Chance Myers (Thousand Oaks, Calif.)
STICKING WITH IT
He was 8 years old when a couple of AYSO teammates ''dragged'' him to a traveling team tryout, but they couldn't get him out of the car. ''I didn't think I had a chance,'' he remembers. But a coach came over and convinced him to take the field. He made the squad and would spend much of his youth with So Cal United. When he turned teenager, he almost quit the game after he suffered his second ankle growth-plate break. ''After my right ankle healed,'' he says, ''I broke my left one in the second game of my first tournament back.'' But seeing his best friends play – guys who played during lunch break at school and club ball after school – inspired him to made a second comeback. A smooth central defender entering his senior year at Thousand Oaks High School, Myers has committed to UCLA.

Christian Camacho (Woodside, N.Y.)
HOMEWORK, THEN SOCCER
Born in New York, he moved to his parents' homeland, Colombia, when he was still a baby. At age 5, the family returned and settled in Queens, where Christian Camacho (No. 144) and the neighborhood kids put trash cans in the street for goals for their daily soccer dose. ''My mom made sure I finished my homework and then I went out to play,'' he says. ''The other kids, mostly Latinos, were from all over – Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Argentines.'' Camacho, who also played at the Bolanos Soccer School, one day noticed kids with soccer gear walking through what looked like the entrance to a garage. He followed them into the Metropolitan Oval, the famed Queens soccer stadium, and when he left was a member of youth soccer power Brooklyn Knights. Last year, Camacho helped Martin Luther King High School, which he'll captain next season, win its fifth straight New York City championship.

Jose Gonzalez (Soquel, Calif.)
QUICK THINKER
The smallest player among the 140 boys at the adidas ESP, Jose Gonzalez, immediately stood out to Tab Ramos, a three-time World Cup veteran. ''It's as if he scans the entire field before he gets the ball,'' Ramos says. ''Then he processes the information so quickly. He reads the game at a different pace.'' That's a necessity for the 5-foot-4, 120-pound lefty playmaker who was born in Mexico and moved at 4 months to the Santa Cruz area, where he played soccer daily on the ranch where he father tended grape vines. ''I need to get stronger,'' says Gonzalez, 16, ''to keep from getting knocked off the ball.'' Ramos, who was also a small (5-7), crafty midfielder with a nose for goal, thinks Gonzalez can flourish even if he doesn't hit a major growth spurt: ''He just needs to keep improving his ability to get away from the big guys.''

Bill Dworsky (Huntsville, Ala.)
TRAVELIN' MAN
Bill Dworsky (above left) remembers that his team, Huntsville SC, got ''hammered'' by the Dallas Texans and that he didn't score. But afterward, the Texans asked him to be a guest player and eventually the striker joined the club based 650 miles from his home. ''During school breaks I get to train everyday with them,'' says the straight A, class of 2006 student who has committed to North Carolina. Dworsky likes that soccer has given him travel opportunities. Training in Bolivia with the Tahuichi Academy for a month, he says, ''was one of the cooler things I've ever done. It was remarkable, so different. Every morning hordes of kids age 5 to 17 showed up. [The academy] took everyone and didn't seem to care if they had any money. I had never seen such a thing.'' He liked the soccer, too: ''Latin America flair, impeccable control. The ball hardly came off the ground.''

Alex Nimo (Portland, Ore.)
DREAMING OF RONALDO
When playing ball in Ghana, Alex Nimo and his pals would write the numbers of their favorite stars on their bare backs with white chalk. Nimo was No. 9, like Ronaldo, whom he watched at ''video clubs'' that showed satellite feeds of soccer tournaments, like the 1996 Olympics, which Nimo remembers fondly because Ronaldo starred and an African nation, Nigeria, won the gold medal. Nimo arrived in Portland, Ore., at age 9 after his family, originally from Liberia, qualified for political asylum. ''For a month, I kept telling my dad I needed to play soccer,'' says Nimo, who landed a tryout at FC Portland, where after 15 minutes Coach Clive Charles moved him up two age groups. Now Nimo, 15, wears fancy uniforms and watches games from the TV in his house. ''I love to dribble, I love to attack,'' says Nimo, who made it into the U-14 national team pool in 2003.

(This article originally appeared in the August 22, 2005 issue of Soccer America Magazine.)