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"They Hopped the Fence to Play": What a Pickup Soccer Game Teaches Leaders About Trust
Most of the stories I bring to roll call are about hard decisions. This one is about a soccer ball.
What happened
On the night of Thursday, October 1, around 8 p.m., Suffolk County (N.Y.) Police Officers Daniel Sanchez and Kevin Martinez were on routine patrol when they rolled up to SSG James D. McNaughton Memorial Park in Centereach, on Long Island, according to Daily Voice, citing the department. A group of teens was playing pickup soccer.
The teens figured they knew what came next. “We were playing at night so we assumed we were going to get kicked off the field,” one of the players told NBC New York.
Instead, the officers hopped the fence. Sanchez encouraged his partner to get in the game, and Martinez, a former college soccer player, challenged the teens to one-on-one, in full uniform and boots, ABC7 New York reported. “You could tell they were a little bit nervous at first,” Martinez said. Sanchez described the teens’ faces: “Super shocked.”
The department posted the video, and it took off. By mid-October it had drawn about eighteen million views, according to NBC New York and ABC7. The officers and the teens later reunited at Suffolk police headquarters, where Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina honored Sanchez and Martinez. The players got a tour and Suffolk police soccer balls, News 12 reported.
“Police work like this, you don’t hear about it too often but it’s just as important,” Catalina said. Martinez put it this way: “I was able to show a passion in my life and combine that with community policing, that is amazing and I am never going to forget this moment.”
It’s a fun clip. But it made me think about a few things that matter well beyond one park on Long Island.
People brace for what they expect from us
Those teens saw a patrol car and assumed the night was over. That says less about these two officers than about what people have learned to expect when police show up. Every one of us walks into a room carrying that expectation, whether we earned it or not.
You can’t argue people out of an expectation. You can only give them a different experience. Two minutes of soccer did more to reset that than any brochure. The unexpected human moment is often the one people remember and retell, and here eighteen million people saw it.
Presence is not the same as approachability
Officers are visible all day. Being seen is not the same as being someone a person would walk up to. What changed that night wasn’t the uniform or the patrol. It was that two officers chose to step into the teens’ world on the teens’ terms, and let a kid beat them, or try to.
As leaders, we talk a lot about visibility. The better question is whether people feel they can approach us, and whether our officers feel free to be approachable.
Notice the small moments, and give people room to have them
The commissioner didn’t wait for a big arrest to recognize these officers. He brought them to headquarters for a game of soccer. That sends a message to the whole department about what leadership values.
Over my career, I’ve noticed that what gets recognized is what gets repeated. If the only things we praise are the dramatic calls, people learn that the quiet, human parts of the job don’t count. They do. And officers will only take that kind of moment if they trust their supervisors will back them for using good judgment, rather than question why they stopped to play.
So here’s the question for your next roll call: when one of your people does something small and human, do you notice it, and do they know you noticed?
Sources: NBC New York, ABC7 New York, News 12, Daily Voice.