It's not just baseball in Dyersville

DES MOINES - An immigrant from Poland came to baseball country 15 years ago to try and sell a sport very few knew much about. You might say Mirek Laskowski was kind of crazy.He might agree with you."I don't know how this happened," said the Dyersville Beckman coach, after his boys smacked Nevada, 3-0, Friday afternoon in a Class 1A state soccer semifinal. "Baseball has been strong here, but soccer is strong here now, too. I'm part of the rec league in town, and we've got probably close to 1,000 kids playing soccer every Saturday morning. It's chaos, it's 27 games every Saturday morning, and I'm providing referees for all this kind of stuff. But this is the payoff."These are some of the first kids Laskowski introduced the sport to, and they are playing for a championship Saturday at noon. The opponent is fellow parochial soccer power Iowa City Regina (14-1), which has won three of the last four 1A titles.Beckman (17-0-1) craves its first."It had to be fourth grade when I first started playing soccer," said Beckman goalkeeper Michael Gibbs. "We had a Dyersville league that everyone could play in, and Mirek was a ref. Everyone started playing. We all played together, all the kids on the varsity now played as a team. So we got to know each other well.""The last couple of years, this is what we've been working for," said Beckman's Kyle Grover, who scored his team's first two goals. "We've been getting closer and closer. Now we're almost there."Also a top seed last year, Beckman was stunned by Nevada in the quarterfinals, but these Cubs had little chance here. This was a game where Beckman had more than the lion's share of ball possession and virtually all of its shots.Grover pulled the trigger from roughly 18 yards out and sent his team's first shot into the back of the net just 4:45 in. Early in the second half, Travis Gudenkauf had a free kick for the Blazers just outside the penalty box that deflected off a Nevada defender, then its keeper, ending up on the foot of Grover for soccer's version of a slam dunk."We knew that we got beat by them last year and that we had to come out hard," Grover said. "We wanted this pretty bad. We were winning balls, fought as hard as we could all the time. Shots just came."Adam Noethe, who also plays for Beckman's baseball team, by the way, had a curling left-footed shot inside the box that made it a 3-0 game with 7:08. Gibbs has been a spectator, more or less, in the Blazers' first two games, as his defense has allowed very little to get to him.That will likely change against Regina, which amazingly has scored goals in the first 20 seconds of its two state tournament games."I have to give it all to the defense," Gibbs said. "They only let me have two shots in the first game. This game, I don't know if there were any more than five. I mean, I had to come up with a couple of saves but not many. So give all the credit to them. They're awesome ... Tomorrow is going to bring a whole new story with Regina.""There has been a lot of progress. Soccer is growing here," Laskowski said. "We started co-ed, and I remember games we'd lose 13-0. Now those are totally different numbers."Numbers that he hopes end with a "1."