To say Cipriano Sanchez leads a structured life understates the number of structures he deals with daily.

Tano's typical victory grin.

Fellow members of Local 882 know Tano - as everyone affectionately calls him - from the airport maintenance garage, the structure where he works as auto technician, servicing the county motor vehicles, greeting co-workers with his big smile and calm efficiency.

Tano is also a master mechanic of soccer strategy - just ask any of the suburban, city and regional tournament teams that face his young players. So you routinely find him at work in another structure -- the Uihlein Field complex on Good Hope Rd.

Virtually every weekend during indoor season, Tano is there coaching one of his teams - he now runs three boys teams and one girls -- with quiet control, hard looks, friendly pats on the back and emphasis on discipline. Tano's charges not only know how to control and deliver the ball, they also think ahead, playing games at ages 12 to 16 that have as much to do with chess as they do with soccer.

Then, of course, down by the lakefront, there is the outdoor field near the Summerfest grounds, maintained by Tano and supporters of his soccer program, which focuses on low-income Hispanic families. The Aztec Warriors Youth Soccer Club uses this field as practice and playing space through an arrangement with the city, an agreement that has continued despite several efforts by some well-heeled groups to wrest away this prime and convenient real estate. It's hard to see anyone questioning the results of this arrangement, because the Aztec Warriors have proved a benefit not just to the Hispanic community but the larger Milwaukee community.

Once past his U-10, U-12, U-14 and U-16 age range (for non-soccer buffs, the U stands for Under and the numeral reflects the playing age), you'll find that Tano's kids are active and often high profile on area high school soccer teams. As he proudly points out, none are bench sitters; all are starters. Yet the Aztec Warriors take any kid who walks in the door and is willing to work, all for a measly $35 a year. And that covers uniforms, tournament fees, everything.

From that base - including children who have never played soccer or never knew they could be good at it -- Tano has developed a training regimen so strong that most opposing teams believe they are playing an elite group, what youth soccer calls a "select team."

An intense Tano coaches his team to victory.

Frequently you'll also find Tano and his youth practicing at the United Community Center, a central support unit for the soccer club. While the Aztec Warriors get some other funding from the Helen Bader Foundation and area businesses, the principal fund-raising is, like so much of Tano's approach, home-grown and community-oriented: Pizza drives, car washes and, the big winner, dances featuring musicians from Chicago or even Mexico, promoted by local businesses, $10 or $12 at the door, sometimes drawing 2,000 to 3,000 patrons to such venues as the old Eagles Ballroom.

The most central structure to Tano's life, though, is his home base on the near South Side. It's one of the busiest houses on the street. In front is the home where Tano and wife Maria have raised four children. The main traffic pattern, though, is the sidepath through the backyard into the garage where Tano services vehicles on the side. The real destination is the garage's second floor. There, Tano has constructed a clubhouse/den, plus a porch with a soccer net where goalies can practice. Inside the clubhouse you frequently find the Aztec Warriors, and sometimes their families and friends, gathering for talk, team meetings, planning meetings, guidance and just to hang around and hear Tano's philosophy of life, history and soccer. Everyone greets each other with a smile and a handshake, coming and going. Everyone pitches in and settles in as if this were a second home.

In the garage below, Tano often can be seen working on the vans used by the Warriors to get to games or when they're invited to out of town tournaments. These vans are loaded with camping equipment so the teams can go to Illinois, Canada and the other invitational destinations. If they can't handle the motel fees, the teams simply camp outdoors in between games.

In the clubhouse you'll also see the trophies that were spared three years ago when a trash fire in the alley caught hold of Tano's garage and clubhouse and burned it all down.

Tano and his Aztec Warriors gather at their clubhouse.

All quickly rebuilt, of course. Here, too, you'll find Tano's proudest awards among the plaques and citations regularly visited upon him by a grateful community - particularly the Family of the Year award bestowed on him and Maria and the Thomas Jefferson Medal for community public service, awarded five years ago. (Tano is still awed by the name of the co-chair inscribed on the medal, one Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.)

Ultimately, though, Tano says his real reward is not the trophies, the plaques and the citations, but what happens to the kids. Quite a bit has. Many have gone on to college, several on soccer scholarships. Some now run soccer clubs in their own communities. All we spoke to express admiration about Tano and how he and his assistants have made a difference in their lives. All mention his ability to make them stand up to work and responsibility and how he instills and insists upon mutual respect.

"Some coaches want to take the best players from other teams," said Tano. "I am the opposite. I like to work with inexperienced players. I like to develop the players. And that's what I would challenge everybody to do."Somehow, without an overbearing adult attitude, with a sort of quiet insistence on manners and behavior, Tano drills his kids not just in soccer techniques but in the importance of education, community, family. Those inexperienced players turn into winning teams.

All of this sprung up almost by accident, none of it envisioned back in the 1960s when the teenage Tano emigrated from Mexico and started working in the fields of Wisconsin while putting himself through mechanics training. He and Maria married and started their own family. In 1980, he joined AFSCME.

A soccer devotee and player from his youth - banners from all of Mexico's professional teams hang prominently in the Aztec Warriors clubhouse; as do photos of Mexico - Tano always played but never coached. Until 16 years ago. He looked at his oldest son, then just 9 years old, and wondered how Cesar would learn the sport as something more than kicking around the ball with his dad.

"In Mexico, we play soccer from the heart," Tano recalled. "And I didn't want him to be in the streets and alleys with nothing to do. And then I saw there were other kids in the same situation."

A clubhouse pizza party.

Everything took off from there, and Cipriano Sanchez, to his continuing perplexity, now finds himself operating not just as a coach but as a community leader, a fund-raiser, a politician, a youth advocate, a counselor and a constant chauffeur.

One reason he cut down to coaching only - only! - four teams is what he and his wife went through when he was coaching eight Aztec Warriors teams.

"That was just too much," he said. "On the weekends, we spent Friday night washing all the uniforms till midnight. And then starting at 7 a.m., my wife has to take one van to Sheboygan and I had to go to Racine. She had to come back from Sheboygan and go to West Bend, and then I come back and go to Madison. It was really madness."

Though regarded as an expert youth coach today, Tano says he didn't start out that way.

"I made a lot of mistakes with my first team that my players now don't see, but actually my first team does. They come back and talk to me about it, you know, because they see the way I handle the kids today. And they say, 'Why don't you treat those kids like you treated us? We missed a shot and you gave us 20 pushups! You were very rough with us. Now today we appreciate it, but you are not too rough with these kids.'

"And I'm honest. I tell them, 'I didn't have a lot of experience. I learned with you. So yes, you paid the price but now I'm mellowed down with these kids.'"

Hearing this, some of Tano's current players roll their eyes. Tano, all agree, is a very smart and focused coach, not a temper tantrum one, but they say he can still scare them with a look or a bellow. If this is the mellow Tano, they wonder, what was the tough Tano like?

Tano not only takes soccer seriously but also such issues as clean play, politeness and emotional control. "He'll yell at us, after a game," said one player. "But not during half time. He doesn't go off as other coaches do. What gets him mad is if we don't have our head in the game, not if we lose to a better team."

Laughs one adult friend, "Tano told me a story about when he played soccer, as a defender and rather small for that position, that sometimes he kept an opponent in check by standing on his foot. But then he looked at me and said, 'Don't ever tell my kids I did that!'"

"I don't think I've ever lost my temper during a game," said Tano. "Of course, sometimes I've had a few things to say under my breath. But I expect my kids to conduct themselves like ladies and gentlemen on the field."

He was unsure what would happen when he first started coaching girls' teams, too, but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise both ways.

"The nice thing you discover as a coach is that the girls are very intelligent, much better than the boys, to be honest with you," Tano said. "But I think you have to have a lot of patience. Last year I got together a group of girls, 13 or 14 years old, and the first indoor game we lost 14 to nothing. And all the girls were crying and the goalie was upset because she thought the other girls were going to jump all over her."

"So we got together and I told the girls, 'Please, listen to me. Yes, 14 to nothing, but we have to start someplace. I guarantee you if we all pull together, and we practice and you play the way I coach, you'll be smiling by the end of the season. But the one thing I ask is that you never criticize anybody among your players until you criticize yourself.

"So, by the end of the season, we played for the championship and we won, 7-6. "

Now most people might regard raising four children - Ivone, Maribel, and Alejandro as well as Cesar -- while doing 40 hours a week at work at the airport (including those on-call bad weather shifts the job requires) as more than enough of a load for anyone. Tano sees it differently, an ethic of work and enthusiasm that may well have been forged by that hard plantation life of his youth

"My job as auto technician seems to give me the energy to come home, have a quick supper and help the kids," he said. "It's wonderful to be able to work only 40 hours or so a week and have all this time for my family and for the club. If it wasn't for the work rules and the benefits, I couldn't do this for the community."

And, of course, Tano adds with a twinkle in his eye, it was perhaps union meetings, rules and negotiations that helped prepare him when he had to talk to politicians, foundations and community leaders about helping his kids.

Little publicized, but intimately know to the families involved in Aztec Warriors, is that Tano is also the first one there when a member of his team is in trouble. He has helped in interventions with young people, not just pulling kids aside when he senses emotional frustration but leaving in the middle of the night to work with parents and officials whenever they call for help. He has interceded with the law as well as with other officials on behalf of his players, and won respect in all quarters so that, if anything, his phone rings more often. "Any time of the day, if the kid or the parents need me, I try to be there," said Tano, "but I can do this because I have a beautiful wife who supports me in everything."

Adolescents do respond to Tano, who looks them in the eye, treats them as real people, seems to tolerate their inconsistencies and speaks in quiet, direct words.

Tano and the Aztec Warriors' salvaged trophies.

As a minority team - indeed, one of the first minority teams in Wisconsin to start showing up at major soccer youth tournaments - Tano has also noticed with amusement far more than anger the conscious and unconscious prejudice that Aztec Warriors have faced. He recalls a recent meet in rural Wisconsin when his kids arrived - with their different language, different rituals of behavior and camaraderie and oversized long coats ("I can tell them to behave, but I can't tell them how to dress") - and the tournament director eyed the visitors with a good deal of apprehension.

Tano was approached and told that there would be a new rule for this tournament. One piece of rough behavior and a special blue card would come out and the offending player would be ejected for two minutes. If during those two minutes another blue card came out, the game would be forfeited.

"So I told him, 'I love this rule,' and I went to my kids and said we are going to enjoy this tournament because we can play the way we want to - no shoving, pushing or jostling, just soccer," recalled Tano. The Aztec Warriors won the tournament.

Tano also has had to go out of the way to prove to referees and rival coaches that his players came from a club team - all comers accepted, skills developed often from nothing - as opposed to hand-selected better players sneaking into open tournaments. Instead of being insulted that opponents thought he might be bending the rules, "I have to take it as a compliment that my kids play so well that they think they must be a select team," he said.

Tano shows his most prized medal.

Tano believes that the club concept is intrinsic to the success of his soccer program and allows him an active involvement in the lives of his players. The clubhouse, he suggests, is not just a place to serve tacos and pizzas after games but a genuine place to share and bond.

"The difference is in the way we treat the kids compared to some of the other programs, where there's not too much of a unity and everyone plays for themselves, and after the soccer game is over, there's a little meeting with the coach and then the kids go off with the parents, to McDonald's, whatever," Tano said.

"Here" - Tano gestures to the clubhouse - "it is totally the opposite. They can spend the whole day here. Together. I think that's very, very important for the kids. They can watch football, play dominoes. When they really become a friend to a friend, they work so hard to help each other."

The fact that the kids like to hang at the clubhouse may have helped save Tano's life two years ago. While working near his garage readying one of his vans for a soccer tournament, a brake bleeder blew up in his face. Tano was knocked unconscious, virtually every bone fractured on one side of his face, his teeth knocked out, his eye injured. Along came one of his players, being driven to the club early by a parent. "Look," said the mother, "there's a drunk lying in the alley."

"That's no drunk, that's coach," said his player, and help was summoned. It took five months of reconstructive surgery, community fund-raisers to help with medical costs but today few people looking at Tano have any idea how seriously he was hurt and how painful was the rehabilitation.

Did the accident change him or slow him down? "Not at all," Tano said. "I prayed a lot. But I knew it would be all right." Tano also frequently shifts any conversation about his program to include the community supporters who keep things humming, such as his coaching assistant, Martin Castro. These supporters, while he was in the hospital, kept the Aztec Warriors going without missing a step. "There have been so many people involved, and so many kids who have grown up with this philosophy of helping the young people, that I know this will all go on when I'm gone," said Tano.

Tano's soccer program has become such a success story that, recently, when Mexican television was looking for a story about Latino progress in the US, they came to Milwaukee to focus on the Aztec Warriors. The days are long past when Tano's teams can surprise opponents with their ability, and Tano is also amusingly aware of how many coaches would be happy to poach his best players to their teams.

He's even been approached by the Milwaukee Kickers, with offers to affiliate. "They're an excellent organization and one of the largest youth soccer groups in the country," Tano conceded. "They offered to pay me for my service to coach over there, and they also wanted to hire my oldest son to be a coach.