Friday, April 3, 1998 | 8:33 a.m.
Any parent would be proud if his or her baby grew up to be something special and was of benefit to his community.
When Howard Hill helped give birth to Southern Nevada's youth soccer program back in the early 1960s, he always dreamed that someday he would be able to point to his child with pride.
Thirty-six years and 15,000 players later, Hill is a proud papa. The one-time goalkeeper for Brigham Young's club team returns to Las Vegas this weekend with his daughter Tiffany, a 14-year-old who tends the net for a Boise, Idaho, girls team, to participate in the Las Vegas Premier Soccer Club tournament at Silver Bowl Park.
From humble beginnings of fewer than 100 players in 1962 has grown a sport that has boys and girls of all ages playing all over Southern Nevada. As one of the founding fathers, along with John Taylor, Tony Foley, Don Marshall and Charlie Kellogg, Hill takes great pride in how the sport he loves has evolved.
"Back then, we were basically an adult team (the Darts) that gave clinics in the area," Hill said. "There was a CYO league for the kids but there weren't that many involved, probably seven teams.
"But through the adult team, we started to get high school kids involved. We got the first high school programs going and that led to the youth leagues feeding into the high schools."
Hill, who lived in Henderson at the time and started the program at Basic High School, said football still was king in Las Vegas back in the early '60s.
"At first, there was a lot of resistance from the high schools because they were afraid soccer was going to raid from the football team," he said. "But we had a lot of casino workers playing in the adult league and their sons were into soccer so it started from there. It grew as those kids got their friends involved."
Hill, the first president of what is now the Southern Nevada Youth Soccer Association, said the sport's low cost plus high conditioning made it popular.
"Once we got people exposed to it, they were hooked," he said. "And it just kept growing."
And growing. And growing. People like Vince Hart, the former UNLV men's coach and current Green Valley High girls coach, got his start playing in Hill's league.
Hill, who moved from Las Vegas to Carson City in 1970 to serve then-Gov. Mike O'Callaghan as director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, hasn't been to Las Vegas for 10 years. He lives in Boise, where he is the branch manager for the Nampa-Deseret Industries store and still is involved in soccer as the assistant coach for the boys varsity team at Centennial High School.
"I still love the game," Hill, 60, said. "I'd been coaching in the youth league up in Boise for years. This was the first year I didn't coach. But I still help out with the boys' (varsity) team."
Hill had stumbled upon soccer while at BYU. He played on a "speedball" team, which was the forerunner to what is known today as team handball. He was a goalie in that sport and when BYU formed a club team in the late 1950s, Hill was a charter member of the Cougar soccer program.
He had played in the competitive pro-am league in San Francisco, and that whetted his soccer appetite even more. When he came to Las Vegas in the early '60s, he saw a pressing need for the sport to gain a foothold.
Thus, the Darts were born. Soon after, an offshoot of the team made up of high school players and eventually youth players evolved.
When Hill arrives in town for his daughter's tournament, he'll see a much different scenario than the one he helped develop 36 years ago. The sight of hundreds of kids playing on a dozen or so fields should make him feel good inside.
Back in 1962, that vision was a dream. Today, it's not just reality, it's the norm. The Howard Hills across America are responsible.
"I have a great sense of pride," Hill said of the youth soccer explosion which began in the 1970s. "No one knows I was involved in the beginning.
"To see how it has grown and to know I had a little part to play in the formation of the league, I'm looking forward to it."
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