“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” Corman McCarthy, The Road.
I remember sitting at the table early on a Sunday last March with my partner Jennifer after an abrupt separation from a popular international goalkeeping brand that I started in Washington 3 years ago. We were working on ideas of how to move forward. We both recognized that I am resilient, built up a great following of goalkeeper throughout the Pacific Northwest soccer area, and through hard work we could overcome.
Like any project, we started first with the question “Why?” Why do you coach? Why have you dedicated your life to soccer? And, Why do you run an independent goalkeeper academy?
The Why’s was answered quite easily. Because I carry a fire for for my family, because I want to give back to the game that has given me so much, because I wanted to support the players and the coaches that desire the same, and because I want to make the world a better place. But, What would be the name? Well, it came to me in a matter of seconds. When I asked what do you ask of yourself and of the players that you coach? I ask for passion as I believe that we all have a fire inside of us that is passed from one to another.
On my arm, you will see a tattoo that I have that is a paraphrase from a novel by Cormac Mcarthy that says, “Is the Fire real? I don’t know where it is. It’s inside of you. It was always there. I can see it.” The story and the quote is a dialogue between a dying father and son who are traveling in a post-apocalyptic time down a road to seek others who will carry life forward in a decent and moralistic way for the world to recover. This book has incredible meaning for me as I have had to make difficult decisions to be able to recover personally from my own traumas and be able to connect to my children. It is this fire that is inside of me that is the connection over the many miles of distance that keeps me close to my children.
So, as a linguist, I looked up different ways to say “fire” in other languages, and found “Fajro” in esperanto. Simply, I changed the “j” to an “i” and created Fairo and added our motto and the theme of The Road “Carry the Fire” and so it began.
The motivation for the brand is to collaborate, and assist other coaches that desire to grow their coaching brands, help players transition from playing to coaching, and create pathways for both to work with others around the world to increase dialogue, international exchange, and learn from each in hopes that we can all participate in creating a better world through the game.
In order to do this, I decided to create websites completely FREE for coaches and players to run through the Fairo Sport brand. Where other franchises charge thousands of dollars over time to be a part of their network, Fairo offers the same assistance without charge AND they can sell whatever brand that they want to. It takes time though to build a brand and that these days is mostly done through Search Engine Optimization.
So, what’s in it for me for growing the Fairo network? It’s simple really: The more coaches that get on board, who blog, administer their sites, and grow their brands, the more possibilities I have to coach and learn from others, travel, provide my children with opportunities to be with their father, and for them to visit places around the country and around the world and I get to learn from other cultures.