In honor of Black History Month, the Richmond Kickers are excited to celebrate Black club icons. In this edition, I spoke with twin brothers, Darrell and Derrick. The Haitian duo discussed their professional careers which took nearly identical routes, life after playing, and the future of the Etienne name.
Both played for the VCU Rams from 1995 to 1997 and joined the Richmond Kickers in tandem in 1998. Derrick made 43 appearances with the Richmond Kickers, Darrell with 41 appearances. Darrell stayed with the club one season longer than his brother.
After their run with the Kickers, the Etienne brothers joined the Long Island Rough Riders and ended their careers with the team in 2006. Derrick and Darrell both made appearances with the Haitian national team, each making eight and three caps respectively.
The Etienne brothers continued to work in soccer after their professional playing careers and would eventually start up The Etienne Soccer School of Excellence in 2009. Until 2014 it consisted of mostly family members but soon expanded into a fully-fledged operation. Over the years the school has expanded to New Jersey, Virginia, New York, and Haiti.
I hope you enjoy getting to know the Etienne brothers as they discuss what makes a good player or person into a great. The attitude that it takes to get on top, stay on top and then pass that knowledge and wisdom to others.
Oliver: What is one of your favorite moments, favorite season, or favorite game with the Kickers?
Derrick: “My favorite season was 98, my rookie season, coming off the bench a couple of guys started calling me Sparky because when I came in, I had a nice little spark. And I did well. I ended up with six goals or something like that my rookie season. And within that season, my greatest moment was against Atlanta. I scored a hattrick in the second half, one of them with a bicycle kick. So that was like my greatest game of my entire career.”
Darrell: “The first contract in ’98. It was our first professional contract, you know, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter about the money, you do it for the love. I was being converted from a wide player on the right-wing to an outside back. So I was pretty much learning the position as well — I didn’t get a lot of time.
O: What was it like growing up practicing with each other and playing against each other all the time?
Derrick: “Highly competitive. We’ve been that way ever since we were kids. We did play on every single team together. Training was most of the time when we were against each other and so yeah, always competitive, arguing with each other. We’d talk trash to each other. He was my only competitor really, the way I viewed it is you know, he made me better. I made him better. I wanted to be better than him and he wanted to be better than me.”
Darrell: “He was always a leading goalscorer, and I was either one or two goals less than him. But I was the leading assist-man. And all of these goals came from me, we had an understanding, we never even talked about it. It just happened.”
O: What was your brother’s biggest weakness?
Derrick: “For me, it was that he always would rather pass, he’d rather get the assist. We equated ourselves to like, he was Magic Johnson and I was Michael Jordan. So I like to score. And he liked it. He had the joy of showtime, giving the assists.”
Darrell: “He sold himself short for defenses…and what I mean by that is he was a great attacker. He was lethal around the top of the box, in the box, near the top of the box, he was good at that. So when he would have to get his mind ready to play as a winger since we did a 4-4-2, it was different. The wingers were wide midfielders that went up and back. It was a different game; at that time, he was focused on the running, up and back, up and back. But the type of player that I knew he was he could play with his eyes closed. But mentality-wise, he was just like, ‘I want to be a forward.’”
O: Biggest strength?
Derrick: “Darrell’s strength to me was his range of vision and passing ability and his range of passing so he could do combination play. He always made good entry passes. When I was playing as a nine, he knew just even as a right-back, how to just shift the ball in, it would fall right to my chest or I’d just bring it down and hold the player off. The post-up game was big in the 90s. He could read my runs. So I thought that was a strength of his, and not just me but anyone he was playing with, his vision and his range of passing whether it was through a combination play joining the attack, or whether it was diagonal balls, balls in behind and entry passes, breaking line…I just think his vision was incredible. And it’s just his passing ability was on point.”
Darrell: “He was a number nine, he was a true goal scorer. He just knew how to create, you know, one of the main things I would say was he was a gamechanger. If the game was on the line, somehow he will find a way to spring it onto us. And that went all the way up to the national team. When we moved to other teams from Richmond, it was the same thing he was very good at scoring in big games.”
O: You guys followed an identical career path, was that something that was intended, or did things just happen to work out that way?
Derrick: “I think it was a bit of both. All the same opportunities that did come we’d both say, ‘let’s go for it’, with the understanding that if one of us made it, and the other one didn’t, it’s all good. You know, ‘we’ll see each other at the top’ was always our mentality. But it just happened to work out. Everything we did, we did together. And it worked well for us.”
Darrell: “Every offer that we got for something, it was always a package deal. It’s like ‘we want you guys to come play for this team’ and, ‘you guys do well on this team, can you join us with this team?’. So when the opportunities came, we took that opportunity.”
O: Tell me a little bit about Etienne Soccer School.
Derrick: “Well, first, before there was an Etienne Soccer School, it was unofficially the Etienne football factory. And that’s just my dad and my uncle, who had all boys. Every single one of us played soccer. My dad had six boys and my uncle had five boys, and all of our cousins played. Like I said, unofficially, we just had a factory of ballers that all played D1, D2, and you know, a couple of us pro. So that’s where it started, from my dad and from my uncle, loving the game in us. Then, when we started having kids, I started training my son, Derrick Jr, and some of his teammates. So just doing private training with some of his teammates, and then more of his teammates, more and more of his teammates wanted to come. And then that’s when we started the soccer school.”
Darrell: “When we started the school, it became like physical training with Derrick Jr. and his teammates, and the goal was still to train Derrick Jr. But it’s hard to do so, to focus on other aspects, he has to work on technique, and his touches. We need to work on finishing, shooting, free kicks, all of that. We needed to get other players involved to work on his vision, to work on passing, give and go’s. Then, players are making the national team and we started to say, ‘wait a minute,’ we’re training Derrick, and the team is getting better. They’re getting national accolades. By this time it was U14, players are making the US nationals. Derrick made the US youth national team that year, a couple of his teammates, a couple of players are going to residency for the USA and we’re saying, ‘hey, I think we got something here’.”
Editor’s note: Derrick Etienne Jr. has since been capped by the Haitian National Team. He has made 24 senior appearances for Les Grenadiers since 2016. He spoke of his experience with the national team and the influence his father, Derrick Sr., has had in his professional and national career with MLS.com.
O: What does Black History Month mean to you, not only as Black players but Black men in America?
Derrick: “My dad is Haitian, and our mom was American. And so we have both sides of Black history. From the perspective of Haiti, being the first nation to lead a successful revolt. To end slavery in Haiti, to defeat the French, and to be free. The first independent republic, that’s where my dad comes from. And that’s where we first got our pride from. A small island like Haiti to defeat a world power, like France, you know, that’s the people that we come from. And to be proud of that history that we made. For me, Black History begins with Haitian history, because we’re the first ones to actually win that, that fight against the whole slavery-racism mentality.”
Darrell: “Our parents educated us on basic history that never came up in school. They know it, they told us about the other side of slavery, the singing and the motivation, and how they were able to communicate. And while they were told they couldn’t learn, they were told they couldn’t read. But there were still the ones that could read and would help each other out to learn how to read. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that we learned throughout the years that could not be contained.”
O: Have you guys ever had to deal with any sort of racism or racial abuse in soccer? How did you take it? What was your method for dealing with it?
Derrick: “We were at an ODP tournament. We played this team in the morning and we did well, we crushed the team. And so, later on, we’re at the hotel, and we get a knock on our door. And it’s one of the coaches and a police officer. Long story short, some kid accused our brother and I of taking a player’s chain. Turns out that we played against the kid earlier that day, he lost his necklace. But the only thing he can think of was the two black guys that he saw earlier that day — it must have been them. What was crazy was even the coaches were like, ‘hey if you guys got it, please just give it back,’ so we didn’t even get the benefit of the doubt. Long story short, the kid ended up finding his chain; it was in the bottom of his bag. And that’s it. There were no apologies, no, ‘sorry to put you guys through this.’ From that moment, my dad would begin to instill in us this idea of being on your P’s and Q’s. Telling us we have to dot every “I” cross every “T” because anything that goes right, they’re not going to give you the credit for and anything that goes wrong, you might get blamed for.
Darrell: “So for me, my biggest frustration out of the whole thing would be when people would say it’s not that serious. We were called the N word, and you go to the coach, ‘he called me the N word,’ he’d say just play, don’t worry about it. Just brush it off. We were like ‘hey these guys are racist. And then it’s ‘you guys always pull the race card’. That’s the biggest thing I hate, three years from high school to college, if you try to speak up against injustice, it’s blown off. Then it’s, ‘there you go again with the race card.’ And so a lot of people get tired of talking about racism because they’re tired of hearing about it like we’re just bringing up something that doesn’t exist.”
O: What kind of advice would you have for any young Black players making their way through the sport trying to be a professional or play a role in the world of soccer?
Derrick: “I feel like this same conversation is had with anyone that’s given advice to a young Black player or a former player giving advice to a young Black player, I feel like we’re having the same conversation, which is you got to give 120 percent. Sometimes being good enough is not enough, you know? You have to do what you can to be better, strive to be the best. Because at the end of the day, in some instances, not all instances, but in some instances, who’s going to get the opportunity? You know, Johnny, who’s a decent player, or Jamal, who’s a really good player? Jamal may not get it because of where he’s from. So, Jamal, you have to be undeniable. You have to play in such a way that you can’t be denied because of your background, you can’t be denied because of where you live, you can’t be denied because of your skin tone, they have to see you as a baller, not just as a Black baller.”
Darrell: “Love yourself; believe in yourself. We argue there is nothing wrong with you, you’re not devalued. You are a real person, you are a smart person. We also tell them, especially those that are in the inner city, you know that you have a tougher road, you have obstacles, you have roadblocks, you have all types of things pulling on you, you know, you have violence in your neighborhood, you have drugs in your neighborhoods, you have all of this stuff happening. That education isn’t the same as suburban education, you know, you got a lot of obstacles. But inside of you is a level of resilience to overcome and to be successful. When you go back to the slave days to the slave trade, only the best of the best were even selected. Only the strongest Africans, the healthiest ones, they literally inspected them, and they’re the ones that actually made it. So for us in 2021, our ancestry is of the best of the best. That’s the blood that’s running inside of us. That’s the blood that’s in our veins, that we come from. And so keep that in mind, when you’re in school. Keep that in mind, when you’re taking your test. Keep that in mind, when you’re on the field. Inside of you is the resilient blood of those who strived to be the best of the best.”
