By Terry Mosher

Editor, Sports Paper

Westsound FC coach Mike Meherg has seen plenty of good players and good people in his considerable experience in the game of soccer. He can now add Ben Van Drunen to that list.

Van Drunen, a senior at Bainbridge High School, is a left-footed defender who is an exceptional leader and skilled player on the pitch, both with his school team and with Westsound FC’s U-18 team coached by former Kitsap Pumas coach John Wedge.

“He’s one of the nicest players you could find,” says Meherg, who coached Van Drunen for years with Westsound before Wedge took over the U-18 team. “He’s well mannered, good natured and supremely confident. He plays exceedingly hard on the field and is the team leader on the U-18 team.”

Wedge echoed Meherg.

“He’s just a quality person through and through, but also a very good soccer player,” says Wedge whose U-18 team was in the thick of State Cup battle in late February. “His teammates naturally respect him, and he does all the good things leaders do.”

One of the good things about Van Drunen’s soccer skills is the fact that he can use his left foot. The same thing that makes a basketball player more valuable – the ability to use the left and right hand equally well – also makes a soccer player more valuable if they can also use the left foot as well if not better than the right.

“His ability to use his left foot shores up the left side of the field,” says Meherg.

“I’m tempted to say I score as much with my left foot as my right,” says Van Drunen. “When it comes to power, I can hit it a lot harder with my left. I’m right-handed, so I don’t know why that is.”

Much of his soccer career, Van Drunen has been a defender, although Wedge is moving him to the midfield where he can attack more.

“He’s got (good) speed, excellent ball control and he can defend and can attack,” says Wedge. “He’s played at the back (defender) for most of this season, but because of his skills going forward I want him to get more involved in midfield. “

Van Drunen comes from an interesting family. His father Guido Van Drunen is a forensic accountant for an international firm (KPMG) that investigates business fraud for white-collar criminal offenses.

“They gather evidence to take to court,” says wife Cathy Van Drunen.

Guido Van Drunen was born in the Netherlands and is a passionate soccer player whose love of the game rubbed off on sons Ben and Martin, an eighth-grader at Woodward Middle School.

“Guido has always been passionate about soccer,” says Cathy Van Drunen. “His grandmother would stay up until three in the morning to watch soccer. In Europe they are much more passionate about soccer. It’s not just a sport but a passion.”

“He got me hooked pretty early,” says Ben Van Drunen. “I started playing in small rec leagues while we lived in Michigan. I didn’t tryout for a travel team until I was 11.

Ben and Martin were both born in New Zealand and because of that have New Zealand citizenship, which means they are Kiwis. And because their father is a citizen of the Netherlands (he got his American citizenship five years ago) and their mother is a citizen of the United States they are citizens of those countries as well.

Before coming to West Sound three years ago, the family lived in Midland, Mich., for nine years.

Cathy Van Drunen is from South Holland, Ill, which is near Chicago. What is odd is that South Holland is a Dutch community and used to dress up in Dutch clothes for celebrations in the city. Now she is married to a Dutch man.

The connection with Europe where soccer is king certainly has driven Ben Van Drunen to play the sport as well as he does. The Bainbridge Island Youth Soccer Club recently named him Bainbridge High School’s varsity soccer player of 2009.

When Van Drunen was 14 he went with a friend (Sebastian Karl) to Spain for a three-week Spanish immersion soccer camp in Madrid that attracted kids from all around the world. Campers were not allowed to speak anything but Spanish. Part of the day was given over to classes in Spanish and the rest to soccer.

“It had Spanish language classes in the morning, soccer in the morning and afternoon and at night,” says Van Drunen. “You had to speak Spanish. You had to speak to the referees in Spanish, which got kind of frustrating.”

Van Drunen will do some more traveling soon. He has been accepted to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He withdrew his application for American University, also in D.C., when the learned he had been accepted at George Washington.

A 3.65 grade-point student, Van Drunen choose George Washington because it offers internships at the FBI and CIA.

“He loves being in the middle of a city and is considering working for the FBI or CIA,” says Cathy Van Drunen. “And he can get internships and try it out and see if it works for him.”

Van Drunen’s influence to that kind of work again was driven by his dad.

“My dad introduced me to some people he works with who have been working with the FBI and Secret Service,” Van Drunen says. “That kind of work is something that really interests me.”

Unlike his father who spends a lot of time in the office, Van Drunen says he would like to be a field agent, maybe for the FBI, or maybe a super spy for the CIA.

“I feel a little cheesy sometimes when I try to explain to people the basis of what it is I want to be,” he says. “But (being a super spy), that is the gist of it.”