Craig Young, left, portrays the soccer coach for players Katija Pevec, second from left, and Jessica Williams, second from right, in the new Nickelodeon show "Just for Kicks."Click photo for larger image.
When: Nickelodeon; debuts 7 p.m.
Created by: Whoopi Goldberg
She has an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony and a Golden Globe, but there's one bit of hardware missing from Whoopi Goldberg's awards shelf -- a soccer trophy.
"Sometimes I wish that I could run as fast as they do and do just 90 percent of the things I see those folks doing," Goldberg said of the weekend warriors who cram the athletic fields of parks wherever you go. "I would have loved to have learned how to be a really good soccer player because I really like soccer."
Instead, she's done the next best thing by creating a new television show about a group of girls from disparate backgrounds joined in New York City's Central Park by their common love -- soccer.
The show, "Just for Kicks," debuts tonight at 7 on Nickelodeon, the children's cable network.
"This is something that's sort of close to my heart," said Goldberg, who adds with pride that her family does include one soccer star -- her granddaughter.
"I always thought it might be interesting to have a show about girls who play sports and stay girls ... and how perfect it must be to be that girl that's faster than everybody else, or the girl who can do more bench presses than anybody else or is stronger than everybody else -- and what would happen if they were all on the team together," she said by phone from her home in New York.
But her enthusiasm was not something shared by most network TV executives, Goldberg added, noting most of them told her bluntly, "Nobody wants to see that."
That changed when she took her pitch to Nickelodeon, where one of the executives had to excuse herself early from a meeting to take her children to soccer practice.
"I said, 'YEAH!' " Goldberg said, laughing, adding that she knew she had come to the right place.
The show brings together a handful of girls from various ethnic backgrounds and social cliques who, after overcoming myriad reasons to dislike one another, gradually meld into teammates who begin to watch each other's backs, both on and off the field.
"The thing that's good about the show is, first of all, it's about soccer, it's showing kids how important physical activity is," said Katija Pevec, one of the members of the "Just for Kicks'" ensemble cast.
"There's not many shows like that out there, that show kids how to work as a team," added the 18-year-old actress, who was a top-rated soccer player herself before she turned her attention to acting.
On the show she plays Lauren, an overachieving violinist, ballet dancer and soccer star whose one weakness seems to be finding a boyfriend. She's surrounded by Vida, the team leader; Freddie, the socially awkward one who is only in her element on an athletic field; and Alexa, the popular cheerleader whose friends are dumbfounded that she would risk abandoning the center of her social universe to take up a rough, sweaty game.
The girls all come from different neighborhoods around New York City that range from upper-class, semi-suburban to some of the grittier corners of Manhattan.
"Whoopi had very definite ideas that they not only had to be ethnically diverse but economically diverse because that's one of the great things about being on a team, that you can have that kind of diversity," said Marjorie Cohn, Nickelodeon's executive vice president for development and original programming.
If she has one mild regret, Goldberg said, it was that financial considerations prevented the show from actually being filmed in her beloved hometown.
Instead, the city's skyline was transported to a studio back lot in Los Angeles through digital photography. There, with the addition of plenty of honking car horns and other street sounds, New York City's ambiance was copied to a remarkably realistic-looking degree.
Meanwhile, if the program shows girls that they can be, not only gymnasts and cheerleaders, but rough-and-tumble athletes like soccer stars and still be feminine, Goldberg said she'll be more than happy. In her day, the 50-year-old actress complained, there were few if any organized sports for girls that demonstrated that.
"You could go play stickball or handball or something," she said. "But there wasn't a group of folks that got together and did it. That's still, in my mind, a relatively new phenomenon.""Just for Kicks"
First Published: April 9, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
