Mike Jeffrey’s earliest memories of soccer are of time spent on the junior high school playground in New London, N.H., playing boys against the girls.

Nowadays, Jeffrey’s idea of a great game is two short-passing teams going at it on a regulation field with a win or a loss teetering in the balance late in the game.

Jeffrey should enjoy Wednesday’s Eastern Maine Class A semifinal playoff matchup between his Brewer Witches and the Mount Ararat Eagles of Topsham. Both teams play short passing games.

When Jeffrey graduated from Wesleyan College in Middletown, Conn., and settled in Maine (his parents had moved here after he graduated high school), he brought the short-passing game with him.

Teams which played the deliberate style of game (compared to the “scoot and boot” teams, as Jeffrey calls them) were few and far between when Jeffrey got his first job in the Southern Aroostook of Dyer Brook school system, where he spent two years with the junior high soccer program. He followed his time up north with a brief stint at Mount Desert Island, where he was the head girls coach for a couple of years. Jeffrey’s teams have always played the same game, however.

“I’ve always tried to play the short passing game,” Jeffrey said. “I just think you owe it to the kids – to let them take risks and let them take somebody on. You wouldn’t think of not dribbling in basketball or beating a kid with a basketball move. It’s the same with soccer. I want them to become individuals who play within a team concept.”

When Jeffrey introduced the style to Brewer’s athletes as the high school soccer program was started seven years ago, he knew it would take some time.

Last year, it started to pay off as the Witches made it all the way to the EM Class A regional title game, and this year the Witches posted a 10-3-1 record and a second seeding in the Heal Point Standings.

“I respect him very much,” said David Gregory, a senior sweeperback for Brewer. “He knows what he’s talking about. I’ve been under his guidance for four years and I’ve got a chance of playing at college. He’s always positive and he’s also a good friend.”

“He’s really a great coach,” added Brian Colman, a junior. “He really cares about the kids and he dedicates his whole life to soccer.”

Jeffrey’s love affair with soccer may have started long ago, but the future of the sport keeps the spark burning brightly.

The upcoming 1994 World Cup soccer tournament, which will be held in the United States, “will give soccer a tremendous surge, especially at the youth level,” Jeffrey predicts.

But will it catch on with the money-spending adults who, outside of the United States, have made soccer the world’s most popular sport?

“I think it’s an ethnic game and, on a worldwide basis, people have their (ethnicity) based on it,” Jeffrey said. “America is such a hodgepodge, a melting pot. I don’t think there is enough scoring for Americans. After all, why do we put a 3-point arc in basketball. We’ve got to do some things to make it more exciting (for Americans).”

Not only is Jeffrey a teacher and a coach, but around the eastern Maine region he is a promoter of the game.

He plays regularly in the summer as a player in the ever-growing Central Maine Summer Soccer League and plays indoor soccer during the late winter months.

He even coaches a team in the YMCA/Bangor Parks and Recreation youth soccer league’s first- and second-grade division.

It is that love for the game of soccer, born on a playground many years ago when it was boys against girls, that now drives Jeffrey into making the sport fun for those in the present as well as the future.