Bullying, hazing and the making of a ‘soccer president’: Donald Trump’s forgotten career on the pitch

Drive north from New York City and into the Hudson valley. Take Exit 17 and follow Route 7 as it heads south along the river, past the abandoned shipyard and the aptly named Cadet Motel. Hang a left after a few miles, wind up a long driveway and you’ll arrive at New York Military Academy.

It’s open, barely. Hundreds of students used to attend this place, but that number has dwindled to a few dozen; most of the 50 or so buildings on campus have fallen into disrepair and many seem entirely abandoned. Come here after dark and you’ll start to feel a little uneasy.

A bit further down the main drive, past the boarded-up houses where faculty and staff used to live, there’s a forlorn soccer field. The school hasn’t fielded a team for years, but this place holds some importance. On it, Donald Trump took some of his first steps toward becoming what some have called the United States’ first “soccer president”.

It’s a title affixed to Trump in no small part because he was in office in 2018 when the US, along with Canada and Mexico, was awarded the 2026 World Cup. Somewhat unexpectedly, he’ll also be in office when the tournament kicks off this summer. He has welcomed international and domestic club teams to the White House and presented the Club World Cup trophy to Chelsea last summer before awkwardly lingering around on stage. Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Lionel Messi have all visited with Trump; the latter was made into wallpaper while Trump went on a rant about the war in Iran. Fifa’s president Gianni Infantino at times seems glued to the US president.

It’s debatable whether Trump truly cares about the sport itself or simply likes the attention it brings him. But it’s a fact that in 1963/64, his senior year of high school at NYMA, Trump played on the school’s soccer team. Peter Ticktin, a teammate of Trump’s who sometimes describes himself as Trump’s “best friend” at NYMA, describes the president as a top player before making an even bolder claim:

“The year we were on the team together,” Ticktin tells the Guardian, “we were 11-0.”

This, to put it mildly, is subject to question. After all, Trump himself once claimed to be a potential professional baseball player, before a little research uncovered that his high school batting average was well below the Mendoza line.

Yearbooks exist, as do newspapers. Combing through them in search of clues about Trump’s playing career paints an interesting picture of Trump’s brief moment as a soccer player at NYMA, and helps add even more depth to arguably the most polarizing leader in US history. Some accounts describe Trump as an incredible athlete, while others are starkly different. Many describe him as a bully, a character trait that was only hardened amid NYMA’s culture of hazing and rigid discipline.

As for Ticktin’s claim? NYMA actually went 3-8 in 1964. The truth about Trump sometimes feels hard to find. Other times, it’s right there out in the open.

The misadventures of Donald Trump’s early childhood have been well-documented in several books and interviews. There’s the story about how he used to glue his brother’s building blocks together to keep him from using them, or how he grew so frustrated with his music teacher in second grade that he allegedly punched her in the face. By age 13, Trump had formed a fascination with switchblades after seeing West Side Story. When his father Fred discovered a large cache of the knives in his son’s bedroom, he shipped him away to military school.

The NYMA of the 1960s was entirely unlike the sleepy, near-abandoned campus that exists today, with a well-documented culture of hazing and abuse akin to Full Metal Jacket.

“The man who was the commandant of the junior school was a really narrow-minded martinet named Theodore Dobias,” remembers Sandy McIntosh, one of Trump’s former classmates. “[When Trump first arrived, Dobias] told him to make his bed for instance, and Trump said ‘screw you.’ Dobias punched him out.”

Most instructors were hardened veterans, many of whom had served overseas during the second world war. Individual discipline aside, they also pitted students against one another, as Dobias did during twice-weekly “cage matches”, where one student would beat another into submission.

Dobias was also the coach of the school’s football and baseball teams, and eventually Trump simply learned how to get on his good side.

“I don’t think Trump ever played sports before military school, but he saw it as a way of getting in with this guy, which meant his survival, really,” says McIntosh. “I never think of Trump as particularly intelligent, just wily … I think he figured out how this guy operated and so, very soon, he was able to get in this guy’s good graces.”

Trump’s exploits – or lack thereof – on the baseball diamond and gridiron are well documented, in part because of the outsized place those two sports have held for decades in American society. Soccer, especially during Trump’s NYMA days in the early 60s, was almost fully marginalized. Trump’s claim that he could’ve gone pro as a baseball player is at least logistically plausible. He could’ve never done so as a soccer player, because there was no genuine pro league to speak of.

There was, though, the Dutchess County Scholastic League, a collection of small schools scattered throughout tiny hamlets in the Hudson Valley and just beyond. Trump became part of it in the fall of 1962, joining NYMA’s soccer team after suffering an injury playing gridiron football.

Years earlier, NYMA had won the league under the guidance of a British coach and his son, the star forward on the team. By the time Trump arrived, NYMA’s “booters”, as they were so often referred to in the local paper, were under the guidance of someone with a lot less experience: Col Paul Curtin.

Curtin arrived at NYMA in 1962 hoping to stay busy after a decorated military career. During a three-year stretch of the second world war, he had tracked hundreds of miles through the Burmese jungle and had flown resupply missions over the Himalayas to support Chinese forces in the China-Burma-India theater. Later, Curtin taught military and war tactics at Harvard. This time on the frontline did little to prepare him for the touch line.

“Curtin didn’t know anything about soccer at all,” remembers Alfred Harrison, a teammate of Trump’s.

Many of the players did, though. They had been brought up with it. At the time, NYMA had earned a reputation as a safe haven for well-connected military families throughout South and Central America, and some of those figures – such as Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista – shipped their children north to the Hudson valley for protection, as much as anything else.

Yearbooks and newspaper clippings make it obvious enough that many of those South American and Central American kids, the sons of officers and diplomats, made up the core of NYMA’s soccer team. The attacking line was Colombian and Venezuelan, the midfield Mexican. Trump, who seems to have played full-back, was joined on the backline by an Argentinian and a Peruvian cadet. As president, Trump has leveled racially charged insults at a laundry list of those same countries. As a member of the NYMA Knights soccer team, he was practically the only white person on the field.

Many former NYMA cadets remember racial tension at the academy and on its sports teams, though those memories frequently come with the usual disclaimers that accompany insensitivities from long ago – “it was a different time,” et al.

“Most everybody on the team called [the Latino kids on the team] ‘spics,’” Harrison says. “But they called themselves that, too.”

“We all called each other names, let’s put it that way,” says Paul Curtin, the son of coach Curtin and another member of the team. “It sounds awful today, and none of it was politically correct, but it was meant in fun. It was all part of the culture of the school, but no one was singled out.”