Forty minutes before kickoff this past Saturday, FC Charleston youth soccer coach Garrison Rudisill got the news that another player would be joining his team of ten-year-olds on the field in Bluffton, South Carolina. “Look who’s at our warm-ups,” read a text message from his assistant coach, accompanied by an image of an American alligator slinking across the grass.
“We’ve played all over the Lowcountry, but we’ve never had a run-in with a gator,” Rudisill says.
Earlier that morning, security guards had found the animal tangled in the bottom-right corner of a soccer net. They carefully cut the reptile free, leaving a gator-shaped hole. But their work wasn’t finished. Exhausted after being ensnared for an unknown number of hours, the critter began a slow, lethargic crawl toward the other end of the field as the security golf cart transformed into a one-vehicle gator motorcade.
“It was so tired from trying to get out of the net,” Rudisill recalls. “It would walk fifteen or twenty feet, then lie fully down and rest for five minutes. It was quite a process.”
As the gator warmed up, so did the team, but wrangling ten-year-old boys to focus on soccer when a hundred-pound reptile is scooting across an adjacent field is as hard as it seems, Rudisill says. But play on they did. “It was still getting escorted off the field when we kicked off.”
This wasn’t the first time an alligator became an unwitting goalkeeper in the coastal South, where the species numbers in the millions. Just last week, another gator became entangled in a soccer net in Manatee County, Florida, but was released into a nearby pond after a swift rescue by the sheriff’s department.
“This gator took the Gators’ loss in the NCAA basketball tournament hard and decided to take on a new sport today,” the unit wrote on social media. That sport has proven especially perilous for the crocodilians, who have been spotted with soccer balls stuck in their strong jaws.
For the Bluffton gator, there were no further incidents after its slow strut, and the creature safely slid into a nearby pond. As for the players, “they will probably remember that more than the game we played,” Rudisill says. “It might deter other teams from coming into our penalty area.”
Helen Bradshaw is a freelance writer and a born-and-raised Floridian. As such, she has an aptitude for finding alligators and an affinity for the weird and wonderful stories of the South. She graduated from Northwestern University with a focus in environmental journalism.
