Maui’s Cannon Vines and Lucas Ginoza had the rare opportunity to live and breathe soccer with professional athletes and coaches in Europe.

Vines and Ginoza were among 36 players from across Hawaii, including a dozen from Maui, that spent a week during spring break to train, compete, learn and watch games with Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) players and coaches on the western coast of the Netherlands.

“I thought it was an interesting experience,” said Vines, a freshman at Seabury Hall. “It’s definitely different from Maui, like, the intensity that the Holland players brought was very different, and I was pretty inspired by it and I want to bring that inspiration back over here to Maui.”

Vines said that his main takeaway from the camp and KNVB players was the importance of bringing big energy and giving full effort during games and practice.

“It was really fun for me,” said Ginoza, an eighth grader at Kamehameha Schools Maui. “The training was really high-paced, more competitive than here in Hawaii, a much different environment because everyone up there are really good players and just do really little things that separates the best players and everyone is just going 100 percent all the time.”

Boys from Oahu, Maui and Hawaii island trained alongside their Dutch peers in the professional youth academy systems of five different professional football clubs, with additional training by coaches from the Netherlands’ national team at their campus in the town of Zeist.

This opportunity was the first of its kind for local players and was coordinated by Aleksandar Filipovic, the president and director of coaching for Valley Isle Soccer Academy.

Players born in the years 2007, 2008 and 2009 were invited to Europe following a three-day youth training camp put on by KNVB coaches at Keopuolani Park last July.

“Most of these boys aspire to play soccer at the collegiate or professional level,” Filipovic said in a news release earlier this month. “This is an opportunity for them to learn from the elite youth coaches in Dutch football and play alongside peers their age in the professional youth academy system. Training in this environment will challenge our boys and help them set benchmarks for their own development.”

Joining Vines and Ginoza on the trip were fellow Maui players Vincent Moore, Jaycen Fernandez, Noah Johannes, Kenji Wunder, Jorden Carbonell, Josia Labuanan, Gabriel Chauvin, Ty Arakawa, La’i Na’inoa Green-Abafo and Corey Swatek.

The Hawaii players had a packed schedule filled with soccer, including a morning training with FC Dordrecht and afternoon training with Excelsior Rotterdam; playing with NAC Breda; practicing with PSV Eindhoven and also with KNVB coaches at the National Campus in Zeist; working with Willem II in Tilburg and then with Sparta Rotterdam; and watching games with other players.

“The first three (days) were pretty fun and I was having a lot of fun with my friends and bonding with them on bus rides and seeing the different players and their skills, but I think the last two days were pretty exhausting because by then I had done, like, six or seven training sessions and I was kind of tired,” Vines said with a laugh. “I think one of my favorite parts was training at the national training facility with experienced coaches and their extraordinary field — their fields were nice and very professional. The coaches had a lot of tips and things for us to get better and different training exercises.”

Ginoza, who’s been playing soccer since he was 5 years old, said that “it’s just a different game up there.”

“My favorite part was training with the players from the clubs up there,” he said. “The biggest thing for me was the intensity that they play at, it’s like always 100 percent — how they train, how they play. Another thing I would take away is the way they play out there is more physical. Like, if I’m in a matchup with someone one-on-one, they would use their arms, all of their body to win the ball and bump me so that I would lose the ball.”

Vines and Ginoza, who were roommates on the trip, both have aspirations to take soccer to the next level.

“If you really want something, like anything in life, you just have to work really hard for it,” Ginoza said.

* Dakota Grossman is at dgrossman@mauinews.com.