These days, soccer parents get their children involved in the sport almost as soon as they can walk.
After an obligatory year or two in AYSO, the children are moved on to expensive travel leagues so that they don’t fall
behind their peers. After all, that’s what their future competition for varsity roles and college scholarships is doing.
Then there’s Mali Walton.
He didn’t start kicking the ball around as a 4-year-old or play in elite travel programs as a little kid.
He’d never even heard of the sport until, at the request of a friend, he saw his first game when he was 11.
“I went to Eisenhower Elementary,” Walton said. “I was hanging out with a buddy of mine, Migeal Swain. He asked me
if I wanted to go watch a soccer game at Atwood Stadium. I said, ‘I don’t even know what it is.’ I’d never heard of soccer.
“We went and watched the game; I believe it was the Flint Olympian Games. A lot of my classmates were playing. I said,
‘Let me try this out.’ The next season, I signed up and started playing.”
And yet, despite not taking up the game until he was 12, he became the biggest soccer star ever to come out of the
Flint area.
