Meet A City of Dalton Employee: Victor Rodriguez, DPRD Athletic Coordinator

The City of Dalton is special because of the people who work hard every day to make it the best place to live, work, and play in Georgia. The City is proud of the men and women working to serve our residents. This article continues a series of profiles we'll be running from time to time to spotlight the special people who are making a difference in our city. 

Victor Rodriguez is an athletic coordinator with the Dalton Parks and Recreation Department. In that role, he runs both of the city's soccer leagues, a competitive team league and a drafted league for kids just starting out and growing in the sport. Growing up in Dalton, Rodriguez has seen soccer grow in the community. When he was a teen in the early 2000's, there weren't as many soccer opportunities here and kids who wanted to play in competitive travel leagues had to go to Chattanooga or further away to play. Now Dalton is home to three travel team academies and Rodriguez is in charge of overseeing a competitive league that plays here. 

Here's a Q&A with Rodriguez about his background and his work to help develop the next generations of Soccertown USA. 

So Victor, you grew up here in Dalton?
I did. I came to Dalton when I was in 2nd grade, I was about 8 or 9 years old. I was born in Mexico and got here in 2nd grade. I’ve been in Dalton really ever since then.

Growing up here, I’m assuming playing soccer was a big part of your life?

Actually, I started playing soccer at 12, which is kinda late to start playing now. You really can’t start at 12 years old. We have kids starting at 4 years old now. I grew up playing more in other leagues, I don’t think back then the Parks and Recreation Department had much soccer. I know I played baseball here [in the DPRD] but I don’t think they had a lot of soccer going on at the time. After maybe middle school I was playing for Chattanooga Express - it was called that at the time, now it’s Chattanooga FC - I was playing with them at the time and playing more in the competitive leagues with outside organizations. That was in the early 2000's.

And where did you go to school?

I went to Southeast. When I got to Dalton I went to Westwood Elementary and then in 4th grade we moved to the county and I went to Dug Gap, then Valley Point, and I graduated from Southeast in 2008. I went to Young Harris and played soccer for three years, and then I came back to Dalton State College. I had my associate’s degree from Young Harris, and I came back here and worked with the county school system for a few years and I finished my degree at Dalton State in 2019 in interdisciplinary studies..

How did you get to this point in your career with the DPRD, serving as an athletic coordinator and overseeing two sports?

I was working for the Whitfield County Schools as a parent involvement coordinator which was a lot of translating, interpreting, and we were covering the pre-K and kindergarten registration at the Mack Gaston Community Center. I knew [Community Center Director Tommy] Pinson for a long time, my Dad was playing baseball and he was umpiring baseball, my family played volleyball at the older community center and Mr. Pinson was over there so I knew him for many years. He asked me what I was working on and I told him I was working for the schools, and at that time it was back in 2015 that’s when they split up the [soccer] leagues – this league used to be run by an outside organization and from what I’ve heard they weren’t in it for the kids they were in it for the money, so the parks decided to take ownership and take over the whole league - and with that they were looking for someone to run the competitive league. So Mr. Pinson asked me if I was interested and so I came to talk to [former director Steve] Card and I was hired part-time just to run that league. I think maybe four or five months later they hired me full time to take over the whole soccer program and the volleyball program.

So now you work professionally in sports and in a soccer league. How cool is that?

Yeah, I enjoy it. Growing up if you’d asked me if I was going to work for the Parks and Recreation Department, I never would have guessed. And I think if I would have known the careers that are available in parks and recreation I probably would have focused on it in college. But when you go to any college I don’t think they really talk about those careers. If they would have told me a little about the parks and the opportunities I would have focused on that. Like I said, I started in 2015 and to be honest I don’t see myself working in anything but parks and recreation from now on, or at least in sports.

How much has soccer in this community changed in terms of what kinds of opportunities are available now compared to when you were growing up?

It’s changed tremendously. Now, we offer drafted soccer (which is where all of the kids sign up and get split up into teams like we do for all of the other sports), and now we also have a competitive league – some call it team league, some call it competitive league – which is where you can bring your own team, hand pick your players and you sign up and you play league games. And in that league we’ve actually got teams coming from Rome, we’ve got teams coming from Chattanooga, from outside of the area to play here. We’ve got the Chattanooga Red Wolves, the Dalton Red Wolves, the NGSA Lions which are all academies – what they do is they put these teams in our leagues so they can get that same competition they get every other weekend or every other month at the big tournaments. So that’s what we mean, we’re pulling kids from outside of the area, I think if you look at it now we’ve got a good 30 or 40 percent of people playing in our league that are from outside of the area. Last season, we had one from Rome, they traveled two hours every Friday just to play in our league. So before if you were in Dalton and you wanted to do more travel soccer back then you had to go to Chattanooga which was the closest – now you we have three teams here in Dalton, the NGSA Lions, the Dalton Red Wolves, and the NSA Belles/Hammers - three academies in Dalton where before you had to travel to Chattanooga to get that higher level of competition.

Not only that but now we have Atlanta United coming in to do RDSL which stand for Region Development Schools. So they were coming in every Wednesday to train with the group, you had to try out and make it and train with the group and try to develop from there. I’ve lost count of how many kids, but I know we have more than six guys playing for the Atlanta United Academy, which that’s all they do. I talked to one of the dads, he said they get out of school and they go to practice in Marietta, I believe, and so they get out of school, go down there, and get back at 9 or 10 every day. And this past weekend, they were in New York playing with the Atlanta United Academy.

So the opportunities are a lot bigger now in Dalton. There are more opportunities, there are more clubs you can play with and then the high schools, they’re growing. I mean we had three state championships last year [between Dalton High, Southeast Whitfield, and Coahulla Creek’s boys winning state titles]. So the future is looking very bright. I’m looking at kids who are 8 or 9 years old out there who are amazing. Like I said, I started when I was 12 and I was not nearly as good as they are. Now, you hear more kids going to college and not only going to college, but they’re going Division 1. For example you’ve got Omar Hernandez who was the Gatorade Player of the Year playing at Wake Forest in Division 1. We’ve got a kid from Dalton who couldn’t finish his season last year because he signed a pro contract with the Chattanooga Red Wolves. So we hear a lot more stories where before there were maybe one or two kids who went on to play in college and it was like, a junior college which is still good you’re still playing, but now with Dalton State being here and getting a soccer program too, that’s helped out the soccer community too. I think soccer is pulling in more kids who used to play other sports – one thing you see at the playgrounds now if you go to City Park, Westwood, Dug Gap, you see soccer goals out there. I think more kids are picking it up than they used to back in the 2000’s.

And you run those leagues for the Parks and Rec Department – so what does that entail?

So what I do, like I said, we’ve got two soccer leagues – and I do volleyball as well – what I try to do is give these kids a safe and enjoyable environment so they can keep playing soccer. That’s the reason we split up the leagues, because the drafted league is more for kids who are starting out and learning - and now you’ll see it, some of the coaches from the team league will go and scout the drafted league so they can find players and pull them into the team league. The reason we did that is because the level of skill, there were some huge gaps so we split up the leagues so it would be enjoyable for the kids just starting out and it would also be enjoyable and also competitive for the kids who are more advanced.

And there’s an opportunity for kids now to play soccer no matter what skill level they're starting with.

Yes, like I said we start kids out at 4 years old in the drafted league, and in the competitive league we start them at 6, 7 years old.  We’ve definitely got a chance for you. If you’ve never played soccer, we’ll start you in the draft and you’ll enjoy it. And if you decide to take it to the next level you can try to get into the team league which a lot of the time, 80 percent of the time, [kids who try to enter that league] find a team.

And where years ago you used to have to go other places if you wanted to play really competitive soccer, now you can do it right here in Dalton in the parks.

Yes, when I was growing up we were going to Chattanooga four times a week. That’s a 20, 30-minute drive to East Ridge. But now you’ve got the academies here, and not only that but in this team league in Dalton instead of you traveling to play that competitive high level soccer, now other kids are coming to Dalton to play that every Friday night.

Dalton High won their first state title in 2006 (with 6 titles in all) and between all of the high schools in the county we've had at least one school win a state title in 8 or the past 9 seasons with three schools winning in 2021. Do you see more support from the community at large now that there has been a long line of state champions in the high schools and success at all levels?

Definitely. I saw it in 2004 when I started playing [at Southeast Whitfield], we’d make it to the playoffs every year and we’d get knocked out in the Sweet 16 but the amount of people I saw in the stands grew year by year. It was amazing. In 2008 we actually made it to the championship game and we had people from Dalton, from Northwest, from all over the area going to watch that game. You’d see people and they’d have no clue about soccer but they wanted to be there because of the community, the community was following it. I think that was beautiful, just because you had the support from people who never cared about soccer or never watched soccer. Just in those four years in high school I saw a big difference, every year it was growing. After high school, I played at Young Harris and I came back I think my 2nd or 3rd year and did some community coaching at Southeast and it was the same thing, it kept growing year by year. The amount of people, the amount of community support has been growing since 2003 [when Dalton High won their first state championship]. I think that was the big break-through and ever since then everybody started following soccer and started supporting soccer.

You’ve worked about seven years with the DPRD, in that time you’ve seen some kids come through your program who are now getting bigger opportunities because of what you’ve done and what your coaches have done for them. How gratifying is that experience?

It’s great. A prime example, like I said, would be Omar Hernandez. When I started here in 2015 he might have been about 10 years old maybe, and you could tell that group he was playing with was an amazing group. And I think there isn’t a lot of credit given to the recreational coaches. They coached Omar, they coached the whole team - yes, he went on to play for CFC, Chattanooga Football Club, for Dalton High School, but it all started with that parks and rec coach and I don’t know if they get any credit, to be honest, but they deserve it. It starts – like our slogan says, "It Starts In The Parks" and it literally started for them in the parks. I think they were 10 or 11 years old when they started playing and you could tell, the level of skill they had compared to their peers there was just a big difference. I get to see them grow, and they kind of phase our of our programs around 16 years old, that’s when they start going to high school teams and they start playing for more elite clubs or they’re traveling every weekend so that’s when they phase out. But we start them at four years old and we kind of keep them until they’re 16 and it’s amazing. Right now we have a kid how was born in 2014, same year as my son, and he’s 7 years old and he’s playing with kids that are 11 years old, and he’s amazing. So it’s just really nice to get to play with these kids, get to watch these kids grow, and then later down the road you get to see their transformation.

You must be really excited about the new soccer facilities that are being built and becoming available around the city and also in the county.

Oh yeah, we have the one at Dalton Junior High that’s almost complete and it looks amazing. We’ve got the two other fields that are being built out at Park Creek that are going to be phenomenal as well. We do have a lot of turf fields as compared to any other city, or any other county, around this area but it’s still not enough. These fields are used Monday through Sunday. Whether it be in our programs or outside our organization with the three clubs, the three academies who are using our facilities and then we have adult groups and other people using the fields – but that field [at the John Davis Rec Center] is being used Monday through Sunday. Same for Lakeshore Park, the Ken White Building, it’s being rented out every day.