Feat Propels Soccer Star to State Honors

TOPANGA — Cathleen Sullivan admires the stunning pottery and tile work created by her parents in their reclusive Greenleaf Canyon home and shakes her head. No artist am I, she tells herself.

Her North Hollywood High classmates beg to differ.

Like her parents, Sullivan created something vibrant from nothing but her own inspired vision.

Like her parents, she molded the vision into something tangible, a girls’ soccer team that will carry on, delightfully kicking and screaming, long after she graduates today. .

Sullivan, a straight-A student who will attend Amherst College, was selected the state female scholar-athlete of the year by Cal-Hi Sports magazine. Imaginative and productive, she qualifies as an artist despite her reservations.

“She learned art appreciation growing up,” said Sue Sullivan, Cathleen’s mother. “She ate a lot of cheese and crackers at gallery openings.”

Now appreciation is being reciprocated for her grass-roots effort to launch the North Hollywood High soccer team two years ago.

Sullivan gained permission from school officials, recruited players and taught them the basics. With Sullivan, a veteran club soccer player, serving as captain and driving force, North Hollywood had a winning record two years in a row, culminating in a City Section playoff berth this season.

“Cathleen honestly tries her hardest to make sure you succeed more than herself,” said Allison Kristman, whom Sullivan persuaded to go out for the team. “She’d stay after school with me three times a week teaching me the rules and the fundamentals. Unconditionally, she was there for me and for the whole team.”

Most evenings, Sullivan wouldn’t get home until dusk, pulling her ’83 Volvo off Topanga Canyon Boulevard and down twisting Greenleaf Canyon Road, a partially paved lane shadowed by a lush canopy of oak trees until it dissolves into a potholed dirt trail the last mile. Her parents built the family’s two-bedroom home and a large art studio about the time she was born.

The Sullivans’ home lacks city or county utilities. They draw their water from a well and use solar power and a septic tank.

“When a coyote chews through the phone line, I’m out there repairing it,” said Jim Sullivan, Cathleen’s father.

The family of three--Cathleen has no siblings--has braved fires and floods. Their closest neighbor is more than a quarter-mile away. Jim and Sue Sullivan sometimes don’t leave their property for weeks, immersed in their work.

“Cathleen is our contact with the outside world,” Sue Sullivan said. “We say, ‘What’s happening out there, Cathleen?’ ”

“She’s done well. When it’s flooding, there’s Cathleen smiling bravely, holding a flashlight, pretending it’s fun living here.”

Soccer became a way for Sullivan to spend time with kids her age. She began playing American Youth Soccer Organization in Pacific Palisades at age 6 and the whole family quickly got hooked.

The past four years she has played for the Pacific Soccer Club with teammates who attend high school at Palisades, Harvard-Westlake, Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Marymount.

Club soccer breaks during the school season, and as a 10th-grader Sullivan realized North Hollywood had no team. She began talking to coaches and administrators, and was told to draw up a list of names of girls who might like to play.

“We posted fliers and put an announcement in the school bulletin,” Sullivan said. “There was a lot of interest. I recruited three or four of my close friends who had never played soccer.

“Pretty soon we had the girls, but we had no coach. Then a new teacher, Ed Hayek, was hired and he said he’d coach soccer. It was like a miracle. He appeared out of nowhere.”

If Hayek’s arrival was a miracle, it was only the first of many. Early practices were devoted to the most rudimentary tasks.

“I realized that recruiting people who hadn’t played was necessary, but we had a lot of girls who had never played any sport,” Sullivan said. “It was so interesting to me. I was in my 11th year of soccer, and in order to teach things that were second nature to me, I had to regress and remember how my first coaches had helped me.”

The team took the field for its first match with great trepidation. It left the field elated: North Hollywood defeated L.A. Wilson, 11-0, a result that was as unsettling to Sullivan’s sense of sportsmanship as it was surprising.

“Everyone was so excited about doing well we couldn’t stop ourselves,” she said. “Normally you would never let your team win by 11.”

In their next match, the Huskies defeated Venice, 3-0, and soon the roster swelled from 18 to 30.

“I’ve never seen players on a team more supportive of each other,” team member Kristman said. “When we were playing well, it was always, ‘We.’ When we weren’t so hot, we were all there to comfort each other.”

North Hollywood finished the season 6-4-6 and improved to 7-3-4 this year, losing to Belmont in the first round of the playoffs. Not that Sullivan kept careful track. If the team’s win-loss record was her locker combination, she’d never get her books.

“I always forget our record, I have it written down somewhere,” she said. “I just know we improved tremendously. It was very rewarding.”

More important was the camaraderie developed by players whose talents and experience ranged from beginner to expert. Sullivan addressed the difficulty of balancing fairness with competitiveness in her application for the state scholar-athlete award, writing:

“We had to decide whether to play only the experienced players and try to win, or throw winning out the window and give everyone playing time, an enjoyment-based philosophy. No one wants to voluntarily set themselves up to lose, so the choice was difficult. The question of what would be the sportsmanly course of action was a season-long dilemma.”

Impressing state officials as much with her thoughtful essay as with her academic and athletic credentials, Sullivan nearly caused an uproar when she told her mother she had won.

“Sue screamed so loud I thought another rattlesnake had gotten into the house,” Jim Sullivan said.

It wasn’t the first time Sullivan’s writing had helped her win a prestigious award. In 1996, she was honored at City Hall for winning an essay contest sponsored by the city Human Relations Commission. The essay was titled, “Los Angeles: How to Make This Living Mosaic Work.”

Again, Sullivan drew from her parents’ work, comparing the rich diversity of Los Angeles to an intricate tile design.

Growing up in near seclusion, it seems, sharpened Sullivan’s ability to appreciate the importance of friendship and community. When her friends visit the Sullivans’ rustic house with its colorful splash of broken tile leading to the door, they feel like they are on a camp-out. They also feel at home.

“The house is so unique, but it is so Cathleen and her parents,” Kristman said. “It’s not like Beverly Hills, but it emanates goodness, just like Cathleen. Everything about it is wonderful.”

Heading across the country to Amherst and a cold New England winter will be a jarring change for Sullivan, one she welcomes.

“I chose Amherst because it’s different,” she said. “New people, a new climate, a new attitude. I’m nervous, but thrilled.”

Her semester break will coincide with the North Hollywood soccer season this winter. Sullivan plans to come home and root for her old team.

“I’ll make a bunch of their games,” she said. “I won’t have to desert them completely.”