Take two cones and toss them on the grass a few yards apart; if you don’t have cones, use shoes or water bottles. Stand and face both cones so they extend out vertically in front of you, one a yard away from you and your ball, the other a bit further. Dribble to the left of the front cone, cut through the center and make a tight, U-turn from right to left around the far cone and head back toward the first one, moving diagonally through the middle once more. Horseshoe around that first cone and trace your path once more. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Stop — switch directions so you don’t become a knockoff Angel Di Maria — now: repeat.
The figure eight teaches close control, movement in tight spaces, creativity within constraints. It can also be just a fun and simple game. One day, Rusty Aaronson walked his young son Brenden through the drill. He watched as Brenden completed a few loops then headed off to do some chores.
Forty-five minutes later, Rusty returned. Brenden was still there, weaving back and forth, around and around; the grass near the cones beaten flat into the shape of an infinity sign.
Coincidentally, infinity is the exact amount of time Brenden Aaronson would run if his body allowed it. Watching the seventeen year old in person — thin and wiry, with every one of those wires electrified — can feel like tuning in to a choppy internet stream of real life. He’s not in perpetual motion so much as he seems to be skipping frames or pausing time, figuring out what will happen next while you sit frozen and unknowing. Then he’s off again, pinging off in a way that makes you subconsciously produce a roadrunner sound effect in your head.
It’s not smooth but it’s somewhat beautiful, and it’s undeniably intense. “The thing about him,” says James Chambers, Bethlehem Steel’s captain and Aaronson’s teammate over the past few months, “He's disappointed when he doesn't assist or he doesn't score a goal. And it eats him. It affects him. It's not: ‘I probably could have done better there,’ it's: ‘I know I should have done better.’ It's a different mentality.”
Philadelphia Union have signed Brenden Aaronson to a homegrown contract that will see him join the first team for the 2019 season. For the past few months, the Medford, New Jersey product, who came through the Union Juniors program and was in the first class to join the Union academy, has looked so comfortable at the USL level that this moment seemed almost inevitable. But the path from sitting in a car seat watching English Premier League games to endless figure eights in the yard to a full-fledged professional contract before voting age was by no means smooth.
First he had to wrestle with the limits of his own body. His mother, Janell, remembers taking Brenden to the University of Pennsylvania hospital because he got such bad headaches after youth games. Dehydration. He just wouldn’t stop running.
Strep throat? He played through it, nobody even knew how sick he was.
Once, on the way to a game, the Aaronsons stopped at a McDonald’s, and a bathroom door swung shut on Brenden’s hand. “His nails were black, it popped a nail,” Aaronson’s father, Rusty, remembers. “And the first thing I thought was: He can't make this game! But he wanted to play.”
Aaronson pictured above with Anthony Fontana.
A sock over the hand like a Michael Jackson glove, tape, and Motrin. He played.
“The only time he ever had to come off of the field was when broke his collarbone,” Janell says. “And he didn't go down, he just said, ‘I think there's something wrong... but I kind of want to go back out there and play.’” Aaronson ended up missing significant time. But when he returned, he shot right back into Bethlehem Steel first team with the same intensity as before.
There were speed bumps at the academy too, not easy for a kid that was always in top gear. At the U15s and U16s level, as other players hit their growth spurts and controlled play in a way he couldn’t, Aaronson was in danger of being left behind. It was a new feeling, and a difficult one to respond to positively. “It's difficult to convince someone that you believe in them when you don't pick them on the weekend,” Union Academy Director Tommy Wilson acknowledged.
“Brenden's work was mainly done on the training field when he went through that difficult process,” Wilson recalled, “And came through the other end of it with flying colors.
“He’s had to struggle. And in my experience the ones who have to struggle are usually the ones that stick when they get to the top level.”
And nobody has ever doubted that Brenden has the potential to succeed at that top level. Rusty tells of the time Jim Curtin sidled up to him at the Juniors program.
The Union head coaching job still far in his future, Curtin asked: “Is that your boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Has he been to Europe yet?”
“...No.”
“He’ll never come back. Leave him here.”
“Here” was the Juniors program, and it became the academy.
But first there was a New Jersey basement. “We had a basement with a carpet and two inflatable goals and we would always play down there,” Brenden’s younger brother Paxten, now a budding star in the academy, remembers. His parents insist Brenden is never riled by the rough treatment he gets as a playmaker on the field (“He’s been a marked man for years,” Janell says). But when he gives Paxten a two-goal head start and still loses?
Aaronson with Union Academy U-14s.
"If I beat him he gets angry,” Paxten smiles, “But if he beats me then I get angry.”
Rusty calls the basement “The Players Lab,” and it has hosted more soccer games than Talen Energy Stadium by some distance. One-on-one, soccer tennis (“the matches were epic”), anything that let Brenden, Paxten, and their sister Jayden get on the ball was fair game. To their parents upstairs, the endless THUMP… THUMP… THUMP of the ball was like the train passing if you live near the El; the sound of daily life.
As Brenden excelled with Medford Soccer Club, his parents sought new challenges for him. This led to the creation of Real New Jersey, a small but deeply talented club Rusty runs that has funneled seven players into the Union academy system, standout goalie Tomas Romero among them. For a time, Brenden would train with the Union Juniors and play with Real Jersey, but eventually he moved full-time into the academy system, seeking to push himself to greater heights.
Make no mistake: The story of how Brenden Aaronson became a professional soccer player starts with a supportive and adoring family, and it runs through the Union’s growing academy, but strip everything else away and you are left with what James Chambers diagnosed as the young playmaker’s key trait: Mentality.
Ask any coach in the organization about the teenaged playmaker and the word ‘mentality’ will arise as if summoned by a spell. But it’s not sorcery — nor is it the storied tradition of the sports cliche — that leads everyone from Chambers to Wilson to Curtin to the word. It is the ferocity with which the young man has met each challenge put before him and the total absence of fear in the face of failure. For creative players, each unsuccessful pass into a tight window can be a heavy burden or a demanding teacher, and Aaronson is ever-willing to be taught.
And that will be of vital importance as Aaronson meets the next challenge in front of him. Historically, it has been difficult for young attackers to break into first teams in Major League Soccer. Right now, a number of talented creators like Atlanta’s Andrew Carleton and the Galaxy’s Efrain Alvarez hover in an uncertain space just outside starting roles.
But the Union and Brenden Aaronson have grown up together. The Aaronson's were at the first ever game at Talen Energy Stadium (“We thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Rusty says. “New stadium, bringing soccer local. We had our section right over there: 128.”) and they have placed considerable trust in the club to manage the development of two sons that live and breathe the game of soccer.
So Aaronson, still thin and growing, may not muscle his way directly into the starting eleven. In fact, it may take time for him to establish himself in the top American league. But he’ll get there. “With some boys,” Wilson says, “You kind of know they're going to succeed when you look into their eyes. There's a desire there, a determination. It's hard to measure it, you just get a feel for it.
“And he's definitely got that.”
