Maria Finitzo Photography by Joel Lerner
Stan Mietus enters a restaurant in Chicago, not far from where he works as a Kelly High School soccer coach and serves as a second father to his players at the South Side school. It’s his birthday. Mietus walks past patrons and wait staff, thinking he’ll be seated with a couple of loved ones for a quiet dinner.
The coach soon notices familiarity — soccer players’ faces and the faces of the players’ parents. The faces, too many to count, are smiling hard at him, thrilled that the coach is sporting a surprised look bordering on a stunned one. It won’t be a quiet dinner. It will be a celebration.
It will also be a night that will help the popular coach and his wife heal some more from a close-to-home tragedy three months earlier (revealed in the film but not in this story).
The scene appears near the end of “In the Game,” an 80-minute documentary by two-time Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Maria Finitzo, a Wilmette resident. She tracked the lives of three Kelly High School students on the Lady Trojans varsity soccer team and their dedicated coach. She started filming in 2010. She completed the Kartemquin Films project this year.
It premiered at the Madrid International Film Festival in July, and was shown in the U.S. for the first time at the Gene Siskel Film Center earlier in Chicago in August.
“It was a film,” Finitzo says, “that was going to take a look at Title IX [a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity]. As I got into filming, that took a backseat. I became more interested in looking at the educational inequalities, based on race, based on class.
“The student body at Kelly is predominantly second-generation Hispanic. The documentary became a story about some of the girls, ‘left behind’ kids, and how hard it is to compete against poverty and issues related to race [as they entered adulthood].
“If you’re a part of a democracy, you expect public education to be a level playing field,” she adds. “If it’s not level, you can’t compete and you miss out on opportunities to get a really good education after high school.”
Finitzo — who, after working with former WBBM-TV news anchor Bill Kurtis, received her first Peabody Award (in 1994) as a producer for The New Explorers, a PBS series profiling groundbreaking scientific exploration — contacted two soccer coaches at Walter Payton College Prep in Chicago in an early stage of her research for “In the Game.” They encouraged her to contact Mietus at Kelly High School.
“They told me, ‘Stan runs a great program there; you should call him,’ ” Finitzo recalls. “They were right. What a wonderful guy. He loves the community and the kids. The first thing I sensed was his commitment to the kids at the school, not just the soccer kids. He’s a real presence there. He has a huge impact on lives there.”
Had her parents not moved their family to another part of Chicagoland, Finitzo would have attended Kelly High School. She graduated from Nazareth Academy in LaGrange Park and studied film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The three female soccer players in Finitzo’s documentary enrolled in junior colleges. All three dropped out. But one returned to a junior college, and the other two, Finitzo notes, also hope to resume their pursuits of a degree.
“Resilient young women, all of them,” Finitzo says. “They have a lot of heart, a lot of spirit. One of the rewards of the project was working closely with the subjects. I learned about their stories, their challenges, their uncertain futures after graduation, their hopes. Establishing a relationship with each of them was an honor.”
To Mietus, Finitzo became a steady, warm presence and a friend and another inspiring mentor for his Lady Trojans. Mietus sometimes held soccer practices that started at 5 a.m. Finitzo’s reaction to the early start time: “Perfect.” Finitzo and her tireless film crew would show up at 5 a.m., ready to roll.
“One of the most positive people I’ve ever met,” Mietus says of Finitzo. “Getting the film funded was tough. Maria and her unbelievable staff, though, persevered. I wish every young kid had a mom like Maria, a role model like Maria. Our kids were so blessed to be around her for as long as they were. They noticed her incredible work ethic. She was, every day, a professional at the highest level.”
Mietus, a native of Poland, arrived in the United States with his family at the age of nine. It was his mother’s idea to emigrate. Aniela, now 76 years old, worked. Worked hard. Worked multiple jobs. The more she worked, the more her son would be able to enjoy life as a high school student-athlete and not have to worry about finding a job or two. Stan Mietus took classes and played soccer and other sports at … Kelly High School. Back then he called his mom, “My foundation, my inspiration.” He calls her that today.
Stan Mietus was hired to coach soccer at his alma mater 21 years ago.
“I was supposed to coach at Kelly for only one year,” he says.
How many Kelly High School soccer players, past and present, are thankful Coach Mietus stuck around to teach, to lift spirits, to support, to encourage them to think big? Way too many to count.
“That scene in the film, in the restaurant for Stan’s surprise birthday party, is the most moving one to me,” Finitzo, in her 26th year as a filmmaker, says. “It isn’t about soccer. It’s about the relationship Stan had established with his players. It’s about what he has meant to his players … as a coach and as a father figure. It’s the emotional climax of the film.”
“In the Game” opens in the U.S. Aug. 22 (3 p.m.) at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Finitzo and those featured in the documentary will be at the screenings Aug. 22 and Aug. 23. For ticket information, visit www.siskelfilmcenter.org/tickets or call (312) 846-2800.