Champion of the underdogs: Youth soccer coach’s commitment to kids spans 47 years

It was his last championship game, but definitely not his first.

Mario Lobo Hernandez paced the sideline of the Spencer Butte Middle School soccer field, yelling instructions as his seventh- and eighth-grade players neared the goal. They were playing Cottage Grove on the afternoon of Oct. 19.

Hernandez has been coaching the oldest boys on his North Eugene Kidsports team for the past five years. Next year, they will move on to high school, and Hernandez will retire from his 47-year run as a Eugene youth soccer coach.

That is, if he can stay off the field.

Hernandez, 81, is known in the Eugene youth soccer world for his rigorous coaching and his passion for the game.

His co-coach, Andrea Pierce, jokes that through his strong Honduran accent “pass the ball” is sometimes all players can make out — and maybe it’s all they need.

“He can be quirky and intimidating in the same breath,” said Gabriel Hernandez, his older son. “It’s a weird mix, but it does somehow unite teams.”

Hernandez coached at North Eugene High School in the 1990s and early 2000s and has since stuck to coaching through the youth sports program Kidsports. Altogether, he’s led 15 recreational and high school teams to championship wins. All of his teams have been on the north side of town, an area not known for its soccer prowess.

Hernandez’s commitment to serving the underdogs isn’t just limited to youth sports, however. It’s been a through line of his whole life.

Beginnings in Honduras

Hernandez doesn’t go by “Mario” in his hometown of Tela, Honduras. There, he’s “Mayito” or “little Mario,” despite his age.

Mayito was raised by his grandmother. He grew up in a home with a dirt floor and got his first shoes when he was 13.

Though he was poor, he made good grades, played several sports and got a scholarship to go to college for journalism in the capital city. He sold fallen mangos to buy his bus fare from Tela to Tegucigalpa.

Tegucigalpa was also where Hernandez got serious about soccer. He played in a semi-professional league during his time in college, but eventually he stopped playing to focus on his studies.

After Hernandez graduated, he took the oath that every journalist in Honduras had to take in order to be a professional in a country where freedom of the press was not guaranteed. He put one hand on the constitution and the other in the air as a man read the journalists their responsibilities.

“Are you ready to lose friends and family?” the man asked them. “Are you ready to be arrested? Are you ready to be beaten? Are you ready to be killed?”

Hernandez was lucky. He wrote plenty of inflammatory stories about the government during his time as a journalist in Honduras, got seven death threats and was arrested three times, but his detentions were brief. He was most proud of his coverage of the Black community in Honduras. Hernandez’s stories held landlords accountable for the community’s miserable living conditions. He still has a copy of tenant rights that he memorized.

Hernandez met his wife, a PeaceCorp volunteer in Honduras, while working as a journalist, and he later moved to Eugene to be with her in 1977.

Just as his older son, Gabriel, inherited Hernandez’s love of playing and coaching soccer, his younger son, Javier, caught the bug for truth-telling. Javier Hernandez is now the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times.

The Honduran journalist oath also charged reporters with being the “lawyers of the people,” a commitment to community that Mario Hernandez carries with him to this day.

Friends and family still report back to him about political happenings, like the upcoming election in Honduras. Hernandez writes pieces about national politics, both in Honduras and the United States, in the style of news articles and columns on his Facebook page. Sometimes debates break out in the comments section; other times compliments.

“Magnífico comentario, Mayito,” wrote one commenter in response to an opinion piece on “coward politicians.”

An old-school approach

Nearly halfway through the championship game, Hernandez’s team was winning but only by one goal. The opponent, Cottage Grove, was putting up a fight.

Hernandez paced and yelled while Pierce strategized with her field diagram.

Across the field, parents were invested.

“Oh man, I don’t know about that,” muttered Burke Smejkal, after a referee made a questionable out-of-bounds call against the North Eugene team. 

Smejkal is dad to seventh-grader Bodie Smejkal-Alameda on Hernandez’s team. Hernandez’s coaching is old-school, but effective, and he provides at a recreational level the same level of coaching that kids get on expensive club soccer teams, Smejkal said.

In Tela, Hernandez played soccer on the beach all the time with his friends. Soccer was woven into everyday life, unlike the structured kids’ leagues in Eugene.

Gabriel Hernandez remembers his dad taking him to the beach in Florence every Saturday morning to re-create the experience — both for nostalgia and for training. Mario Hernandez took one of his high school teams to Florence one year as well.

“You don’t realize you’re working as hard because you’re on the beach, but it is definitely harder to move and you definitely build strength,” Gabriel Hernandez said.

Rain or shine, Mario Hernandez would always jump in the water at the end of their beach training, forever a kid at heart, his son said.

Back on the championship game field, the referee pulled a yellow card on eighth grader Genki Monteagudo and a chorus of surprise rose from North Eugene parents. Monteagudo was not a player who usually received yellow cards.

“Genki?”

Hernandez raised his arms in the air in protest. He spoke to the referee before letting the matter go.

Malena Simmons, mom of eighth grade forward Lakai Simmons, held her phone up to capture the game for her husband, who was FaceTiming from his military deployment across the world. Simmons coached alongside Hernandez for two seasons when he coached her younger son Maddox.

“‘What are you doing?’ is his famous line,” Simmons said. “It’s complete love, but it’s like high, high expectations.”

Hernandez taught her that getting a skill right is more important than doing lots of different drills during practice, and patience is paramount. During the fall 2025 season, Simmons saw him work his magic to bring the younger half of the team up to the level of the other kids Hernandez had been coaching for years. It took some work to get the older kids to pass the ball to the younger kids, but it finally happened.

A soccer coach himself for Eugene Metro Fútbol Club, Gabriel Hernandez sees the bigger picture of Eugene youth soccer and his dad’s important role in an underserved area.

“Our side of town isn’t really a soccer-friendly side of town — I think that’s more of a south Eugene thing,” Hernandez said. “And yet he produces a lot of youth teams out of north Eugene that tend to do pretty well.”

Mario Hernandez’s players are from a diverse array of backgrounds. During a game in a recent season, one of his players came to the sideline in tears. He told Hernandez that a player on the other team had called him “a monkey,” a racial slur. Standing up for his player, Hernandez later demanded that the league expel the player and the coach. League officials reprimanded the player.

Soccer on Sundays

Hernandez started coaching soccer when he moved to Eugene before he could speak English.

Gabriel Hernandez remembers the early challenges his dad faced as an immigrant in the 1980s and ’90s, including many incidents of racism. He would visit the factory that his dad worked in and see messages like “Go back home” on his dad’s locker. Mario purposefully did not clean the messages off.

“He would make sure that we, as children, saw it, and knew that he wasn’t flustered or angry at it, but it existed,” Gabriel Hernandez said.

After Mario Hernandez passed his English test, he got certified through Lane Community College in drug and alcohol counseling and domestic violence counseling. He then went on to work with inmates as a counselor in the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem. 

Hernandez’s main clients were men who had beaten or killed their wives and women who had killed their husbands. He figured out how to do small things for them, like sneak a man’s broken glasses out, get them fixed and sneak them back in.

“I treated them like humans,” he said.

Hernandez was a natural leader in his home town in Honduras, always the master of ceremonies for holidays and the organizer of the annual fair. In Eugene, he became a similar figure within the Latino community.

He volunteered for a time at Centro Latino Americano, a mental health center for the Latino community, teaching court-ordered parenting classes for people charged with domestic violence. At other points of his career, he worked for Lane County and the University of Oregon connecting migrant farm workers to resources and education opportunities. 

Hernandez also ran the Latino soccer league in Eugene in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Gabriel Hernandez said his dad was able to recreate a feeling of home for many people through the league’s Sunday games at Maurie Jacobs Park, where there were food vendors and Spanish was the predominant spoken language.

“I played with and met a lot of people that had nothing when they came here, but they did have soccer on Sunday, and he made that accessible and affordable,” Gabriel Hernandez said.

Hernandez helped start a Spanish newspaper in Lane County called Noticiero Informativo, which has since been discontinued. He parted ways with the organization because of a disagreement about editorial direction. The newspaper closed soon after he left.

Hernandez is, by nature, political, but he believes in the power of sports to bring people together across party lines. The current political climate has taken a toll on some of his friendships, however.

Hernandez goes to The Keg on West 11th Avenue every Sunday to watch his favorite football team, the Las Vegas Raiders, and spend time with other bar regulars. Recently, however, a couple whom he has been friends with for 24 years stopped talking to him after Hernandez shared his views on President Trump and his crackdown on immigration.

Hernandez himself was stopped by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in a Fred Meyer parking lot on River Road, even though he is a U.S. citizen.

“I talked about how they treat us like dogs,” Hernandez said.

‘See you on the field’

Hernandez’s team won the Oct. 19 championship, 6-1. The game’s conclusion did not come with jumping and screaming, however. Hernandez hates when teams rub their victories in opponents’ faces.

Instead they had an orderly medal ceremony and four days later, a pizza party at Putters. There was a raffle for Costco-sized food items that Hernandez brought, including a massive box of Frosted Flakes, and parents presented a gift for Hernandez: a new Raiders jacket — complete with a hood for rainy Oregon days.

While he’s told everyone that the short spring season will be his last with Kidsports, Hernandez now questions his decision. Gabriel Hernandez doubts his dad can step away.

“It’s an obsession,” he said. “He has to be out there doing something.”

Even if he doesn’t coach, Mario Hernandez will be around. Parents always spot him at school sports games. Whether it’s a North Eugene High School soccer game or a Kelly Middle School track meet, he shows up to support his current and former players.

As kids chowed down on pizza, Hernandez told the seventh and eighth graders how proud of them he was and apologized, with a smile, for all the yelling. He closed with a promise to the eighth-graders that he has fulfilled for decades of former players.

“I will see you on the field for the next four years,” he said. “I will be there.”