‘I’m pretty sure I didn’t imagine it’: the little-known trio of high schoolers who made USMNT history

If 16-year-old Cavan Sullivan takes the field for the US men’s national team in the coming days, he will join a list of youngest-ever US players that has no shortage of recognizable names.

At the top is onetime phenom (turned cautionary tale) Freddy Adu, still the youngest player to ever appear for the US men. Names in the top 20 like Eddie Gaven and Bobby Convey will feel familiar to longtime US fans; Christian Pulisic, Yunus Musah and Gio Reyna are all still very much in the picture and may well prove to be Sullivan’s future partners in attack.

Just below Adu’s name and above those five mentioned is a trio of names unknown to the vast majority of US fans: Mike Slivinski, Mark Jonas and Nelson Vargas. All three players made their debut in a 1991 friendly against Jamaica, with Slivinski and Jonas both younger than Sullivan will be should he appear for the US this window. Only Vargas featured for the US again, capped an additional three times between 1991 and 1994.

The idea of a 16-year-old representing the US at the senior level has been mainstreamed by now, but it was unheard of in the early 1990s, long before the US Soccer Federation pumped millions into youth development and talent identification. So much so that when Sullivan received his call-up last week, nobody seemed to even remember the three players who, more than three decades ago, carved their names into the record books.

“A buddy of mine sent me an article about [Cavan’s call-up], and it said he’d be the second-youngest player in US history,” says Slivinski, breaking into laughter. “What am I, a fucking ghost? I don’t think it was a dream, I’m pretty sure I didn’t imagine the one game I played.”

When Bora Milutinovic took the reins as US head coach in 1991, he inherited a program approaching the most pivotal moment in its history. A year earlier, the US had appeared in their first World Cup in four decades. In three years, the country would host the tournament for the first time. It was imperative, then, that the USMNT put in a decent showing on home soil.

Milutinovic took a long, wandering path to the USMNT, with stops as a player or coach in a dozen or so different countries. He led Mexico at the 1986 World Cup and Costa Rica in 1990, guiding both sides to their then-best-ever finishes. His reputation as a bit of a miracle worker – a specialist extracting results out of underperforming teams – was a perfect fit for a US side who lacked little in the way of grit but still missed the quality to compete with the world’s best.

In short order, Milutinovic set out on a talent identification journey that was unprecedented at the time, calling hundreds of players into varying camps and handing nearly 50 of them their first caps in his three years at the helm.

In August 1991, that scouting journey took Milutinovic to the U-17 World Cup in Italy. There, an unheralded group of US youngsters bossed an Italy squad featuring Alessandro Del Piero and an Argentina team led by Marcelo Gallardo and Juan Sebastián Verón. The US would be undone by eventual champions Ghana in the semi-finals, but several players had managed to leave their mark on Milutinovic and his staff.

Among them was Slivinski, who’d grown up in a trailer park in St Charles, Missouri, across the river from St Louis. Long before the era of MLS Next Pro or elite youth travel teams that sometimes resemble professional clubs, Slivinski honed his skills at his local high school, eventually earning a look from US Soccer.

“Those Italy players from that U-17 World Cup left and went back to training with Fiorentina,” Slivinski says, laughing. “I left that tournament and went right back to training with Francis Howell North [high school].”

Slivinski’s partner in midfield, Vargas, also caught Milutinovic’s eye. Vargas’s footballing journey in some ways mirrors that of US legend Clint Dempsey, whose skillset and mentality was tempered playing in the Mexican men’s leagues of his home town. Raised by a Colombian father, Vargas was featuring in Miami’s highly-competitive Sunday leagues at age 13, often lining up against ex-professional players twice his age and size.

“If you’re good enough,” Vargas says now, “you’re old enough.”

Like Slivinski, Jonas was 16 at the time and also played for his high school team. His profile, though, was greatly boosted by his presence on an elite club side in Maryland, a hotbed that had produced several members of the 1990 World Cup squad. Jonas was a participant in the federation’s Olympic Developmental Program, at the time the only true pathway for a youth player to stay on the radar of the senior national team.

The three arrived in North Carolina three days before the USMNT’s 14 September friendly against Jamaica and joined a mix of other newcomers and regulars. The three high schoolers joined up with US staples such as Paul Caligiuri, Fernando Clavijo and Hugo Pérez.

“Just being around some of the guys from the full team, it was incredible,” Jonas says. “Chris Henderson was there. I remember Clavijo left a huge impression on me, he was a very hard-nosed player. It was crazy to see how everything translated; I was a kid and that was the first time I had ever played against full-grown men, the speed of everything.”

“Time and space,” Vargas says, “becomes a lot harder to manage with grown men, if you’re not used to it. Everything happens a lot faster.”

There is no video of the match – there never was, as most US friendlies weren’t widely broadcast. When asked, none of the three even had a photo of their time with the senior team. But by most accounts Slivinski, who had been handed a surprise start, acquitted himself well. The US took a first-half lead on a goal by indoor and outdoor soccer journeyman Sadri Gjonbalaj. Not long after, Slivinski made his mark, drawing a foul about 25 yards from goal and coming very close to converting it on the ensuing free kick. Then came a breakaway and a shot across the face of goal which once again challenged Jamaica’s keeper.

“This experience is indescribable,” Slivinski told the local paper after the match. “It’s just a massive honor. I am thrilled, nervous and a little speechless, honestly.”

Vargas and Jonas entered the match in the second half, doing enough to draw praise from Caligiuri and Milutinovic. The occasion, though, seemed entirely lost on the press; soccer-specific publications like Soccer America noted the fact that Slivinski had become the youngest-ever US men’s player (Mia Hamm debuted for the women at age 15 in 1987), but newspapers never made mention of the fact.

“If it would have happened today, it would have been a big deal,” says Vargas. “But soccer in the US just wasn’t what it is now, at all, there was no social media or coverage back then. But that is what it is.”

The attention isn’t the only thing that eluded the trio of youngsters after their debut, which for Jonas and Slivinski served as their lone appearances with the US.

“I kept my jersey on after the match, I wore it back to the hotel soaking wet,” says Slivinski. “Thinking maybe they’d let me keep it. But that shows you how different a time it was – [US Soccer] probably didn’t have the money to do that.”

All three US debutants had dreams of future call-ups, of maybe even making the 1994 World Cup squad. For Slivinski and Jonas, those dreams proved fruitless; injuries derailed Slivinski’s national team ambitions, though he’d go on to win an NCAA championship at the University of Virginia and MLS Cup with DC United before hanging up his cleats in 2000. He never played with the national team again.

“Injuries, I guess, did me in,” Slivinski says. “But I also didn’t try hard enough, I don’t think. Mentally, I just wasn’t there.”

Jonas, too, faced his own frustrations. In 1992, he departed for North Carolina State, where he’d earned an athletic scholarship. It seemed a decent move at the time, but he quickly found himself with a college coach hesitant to release him to attend youth national team camps. Quickly, Jonas disappeared from Milutinovic’s radar and disappeared into the wild world of late-’90s US minor league soccer, featuring for the likes of the Cleveland Crunch, Philadelphia KiXX and Virginia Beach Mariners.

“It was frustrating,” Jonas says. “A total grind. There were guys that were younger than me in college that I was definitely better than – they got more opportunities than I did just because of their age and the way the landscape changed. After the national team, if you weren’t getting called up any more then you were essentially on your own. I remember cold-calling coaches trying to get tryouts, teams were folding every year. It was just night and day to what it is now.”

Vargas would go three years before pulling on the US shirt again, eventually featuring in a trio of late-1994 friendlies just before Milutinovic was forced out as US boss. Vargas remembers incoming head coach Steve Sampson warmly, but Sampson never gave him a look. He’d get one more chance, though, to represent the US, featuring for the Olympic team at the 1996 Games in Atlanta. Vargas did manage a decent run in MLS, featuring for the Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny, both of whom folded not long after Vargas retired in 2000.

Vargas did hit the pitch once more, though: he played former USMNT player John Souza in The Game of Their Lives, the film dramatization of the US’s shock victory over England at the 1950 World Cup.

All three have since transitioned into youth coaching, perhaps offering them some unique insight into the potential fate of Sullivan and the other teenagers on Mauricio Pochettino’s roster for this international window. Comparing the environment those kids came up in with the one they navigated, though, proves difficult.

“When I was Cavan’s age, that was 35 years ago,” Jonas says. “It’s good to see things changing. I am coaching in MLS Next right now; these teams are treated like national teams, practically. There’s residency, all of their expenses are taken care of, they travel in buses and planes and they’re flying together, wearing the same stuff. It’s insane, it is nothing like what we came up in. There was just no real support back then.”

“It is great that these kids get these opportunities,” Vargas adds. “This kid Cavan, he has all the tools. Why not let him test himself against the best players, the older players? The only way you learn how to deal with the fire sometimes is to get thrown into it.”