A Quick (HA!) Introduction
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| On the Kennebec River in Bath, ME With my main man, Sam. |
The broad strokes are these:
Schools/Playing Days
I was born in Maine, lived near Bath (home of the finest American shipbuilding tradition; our museum proves it) in a town called Arrowsic (pop ~500). I began playing soccer around age 5, and never looked back. After a more-so-than-usual poor academic performance in my
junior year of high school at the local public school, I was offered the chance to investigate attending a boarding school. Given that my options appeared to be either military service or prep school, I showed some common sense for once and chose to leave the fighting to tougher/braver people. I then attended Kimball Union Academy, repeated my junior year thus spending five long years to complete the normal four-year course of high school study. Thankfully, KUA was, and still is in some cases, the home of many wonderful teachers...in all likelihood very similar to the teachers I simply never got to know as well in public school. Living with your teachers together in a dorm makes the dynamic change quite a bit. Happily, I was granted the requisite assistance/support to sort myself out and get on the college track.
I was recruited to Kenyon College after a decent spring and summer of playing for the Upper Valley Lightning, a club run at the time by Dartmouth College staff. The Dartmouth coach at the time was Fran O'Leary (now of Bowdoin College) who had just left Kenyon a season or two before. Through that connection, Kenyon became the place for me, and I spent four wonderful, rocky, challenging years growing up. My first season at Kenyon was an unmitigated disaster personally, as I was cut from the playing roster and had to watch from the sidelines as my teammates enjoyed a run to the NCAA championship match, including playing all the tournament games at home. Sadly, The College of New Jersey won in the fourth overtime, 2-1. I spent that season contributing as I could by training each day with the squad, but along with several classmates and a couple older players, very much out of the spotlight. C'est la vie.
My second season was a similar mess, as the team enjoyed a great run all year, but a 1st round NCAA loss to arch-rival Ohio Wesleyan University. I was petulant about my playing time in the pre-season, and left the team after the first match of the year, when we won (if memory serves) 6-0 at home, and I was the last player to get playing time, to the tune of some small handful of minutes...less than five, I believe! Stupidly, I quit shortly thereafter (though my teammates busted my chops that I waited until after the team photo, and am officially listed as being on the team that year.)
The coach left that fall, however, and in the spring of my sophomore year, the new coach had the varsity squad scrimmage the club team, with which I was playing. Though recruited as a defender, on the club side I played in the attack, and that spring I was able to slide a goal or two past the varsity team, prompting the coach to ask me why I wasn't on the varsity team. I shared my story, and was granted a reprieve, rejoining the team that spring. I played with very modest results the next two seasons as a striker... scoring twice in some 30 or 35 games. The team, however, began struggling and we went from nationally ranked sophomore year to 8-9 my junior year, and worse still my senior campaign. To this day, I hope it was coincidence!
For all that, I enjoyed being on the team. I loved playing the game at the college level, no matter how screwy things were between myself and the coach, or what our record was, and I also learned a great deal about coaching, management and leadership. Namely, I learned a lot of what not to do.
Professional Steps
I graduated from Kenyon thinking that I would give coaching a go (at the college level only...didn't want to deal with parents and politics...) and landed a great gig with a young coach named Neil MacDonald at Iowa Central Community College (NJCAA Division I...two year program with scholarships) located in Fort Dodge, IA - home to the national trucking company, Decker and the Friskies Cat Food Plant:
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Neil is now at Mississippi State coaching the women, but at the time I knew him, we coached the men and women simultaneously at ICCC...that was a juggling act! The players were awesome kids, though only slightly younger than myself, and Neil was a fine role model and first boss for me. But the distance to my family in New England (sister in Boston, folks still live in Maine) and my then-girlfriend/now wife, Heather, living in Canton, NY while working for St. Lawrence University was a bit too much.
I returned East after about a year in Iowa, and got a job as the assistant coach at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY (see below for the location of Potsdam, and the driving time from NYC!) where I worked with the women's soccer and women's lax programs for two years. The head coach, Laurel Stewart Kane, is a great coach and remains at Clarkson. She was also a Hall of Famer at Earlham College in Indiana.
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After Clarkson, I was hired as the head coach of women's soccer and women's lax at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH. A truly great gig (though coaching two teams is taxing...life in Division III!) that was not to last, sadly. After four seasons with the soccer program at Colby-Sawyer, I left my position and followed my wife shortly thereafter to Hamilton, NY, where I latched on with the Colgate University women's soccer team in the fall of 2007. Athletics website here.
I spent the first two years at Colgate exclusively with the women's team, working club and volunteering as the GK coach. I became the boy's director of coaching for the Odyssey Sport Soccer Club in 2008 and in 2009 started to volunteer with the Colgate men's soccer team as well. In time, my work at Colgate became primarily focused on the men's team, and in 2011 a second GK coach (and former Colgate player) returned to town to work with the women, and I took a little off my plate and spent the last year on the men's/boy's side of the game. I am pleased to mention that my final year at Colgate was as a paid coach- the only paid second assistant the soccer teams had up to that point. I am even more happy to report that it appears the University has kept the money available for my replacement(s) and so I've been able to help a fellow coach or two advance!
Raison d'etre
That's a pretty brief explanation of where I've spent the last couple decades, but it's a good start.
More to the point is the manner in which I felt called to the profession of coaching. I started out in the game like most kids, having fun and discovering that I was pretty handy at running around with a ball at my feet. As time wore on, I dabbled in other sports: basketball was big until a middle school coach made training sessions into torture sessions, and the game allowed for no autonomy for the players. I skied constantly (best mountain in New England...things have changed, but I loved Sugarloaf/USA) but just couldn't find a passion for making that a competitive endeavor. I played tennis, pole vaulted for several track seasons, spent a winter racing in nordic skiing races, and tried baseball for a while (too scared of the pitching; who the heck trusts a 13 year-old to throw a ball as hard as he can from 60 feet away?!)
But soccer was always the main thing for me. No surprise there. In high school, I had the chance to spend two spring breaks playing with select teams in Europe, travelling to France, Italy and England. It was in England where I saw Man U play at Crystal Palace (that tells you how long ago that trip was!) and I was seated directly behind a Man U supporter in a wheelchair. He had a jacket covered with Man U collectors pins, and at the end of the game, after chatting together throughout the match, and listening to many tales of the glories of the Red Devils, he gave me a pin from his jacket. I am ashamed to say the pin has been misplaced in one of the aforementioned moves...
But I have remembered that game ever since, and what at the time was probably normal teenage melodramatic reaction has become a lasting impression I still think about. I went home from the England trip thinking that I was pretty lucky to be bouncing around internationally (even if unimpressively) playing soccer. Here was a fellow who loved the game, loved his team, but was unable to play. I got it in my head that I would play if not for that guy, with him in mind. I doubt he'd take much satisfaction in the level of my play in his honor! I wanted to play the game knowing all the time how fortunate I was and with the recognition that the game could be taken away from me.
After the second trip to Europe, the coaches offered us a chance to receive a little evaluation based on our play, and some guidance as per the college scene. I was young, only a sophomore, but was not expecting to hear from Mark Kerkorian (a bit of a legend in college soccer) that I was too small and too slow to play at the college level. Now, perhaps he meant division I, or some other such equivocation, but it rang in my ears from that day forward as an absolutism and it got me out of bed a lot of days. That was the point at which I began truly working at the game, putting in time in the weight room and in running shoes, doing everything I could think of to prove him wrong. I've never caught up with Mark since, and I'm sure he wouldn't recall me, or our conversation, but he's been a large factor in my soccer career.
The closest I came to losing the game was never physical, but rather academic. I wasn't a highly motivated student in high school, despite having, evidently, some latent talent. In my first junior year, I managed to flunk the final quarter of Algebra II (to this day, I do all my math via calculator...) despite passing for the year with a C average. This impacted my ability to play soccer as a senior in the fall, and after several good faith attempts to retake the course over the summer to correct the failing mark were rebuffed by the school administration, my parents saw an opening. I was offered, and accepted, the chance to look at prep schools, and landed at Kimball Union - the one school I happened to meet the varsity coach, at the time Scrib Fauver, former lawyer-turned Spanish teacher. Somewhat surprised by my own explicit admission that playing soccer was worth more than staying in town, with old friends, I felt an even deeper connection to the game.
It was this connection that helped me as a kid from a largely blue-collar town adjust to life with the children of the privileged - in my hometown I was the one-percent. Twas not so in the New England prep school scene! Kids with every advantage I'd had and more were now my competition, and it freaked me out. But as I settled in, rightly or wrongly, I recall thinking to myself that no matter what anyone had that heightened their station above mine (how over-simplified high school kids are...) I was the top soccer player at the school. It wasn't much, but it was a source of confidence and value that can be hard to come by as a teenager. In time, I saw that I did in fact have the academic chops to get the grades, and earn admission to a selective private college. I owe a lot of that to many good people who befriended me, taught me, and stuck by me on some bad days...it was a true group effort getting this guy to a college degree.
At Kenyon, where I met my wife, we returned to get married, and I alternately suffered and enjoyed all the usual collegiate experiences one would expect, soccer loomed large. Oddly, it was the single most challenging aspect of my time there. I breezed through classes (save that one, sophomore year...) writing my thesis and most of the social engagements. But soccer just didn't want to let me have it easy. I envied deeply my teammates who played that freshman season when the team went to the national final, and I was tormented about whether or not to continue playing after the sophomore fall.
In the final analysis, though, it was probably never in doubt. I wasn't quite as gung-ho by my senior year, and maybe that was a sign of a lack of commitment, or maybe it was a sign of achieving some degree of mature perspective- I wasn't going to let some struggles ruin my whole life, nor was I going to expect everything to be perfect all the time. And I suppose, after watching so many guys, for many good reasons, not hang in for four years (roughly 60% dropout rate in men's college soccer, I would estimate after 16 years playing and coaching in college) my damned stubborn streak just wouldn't let me walk away. And maybe I just wouldn't let Coach Kerkorian be right about me, someone he really never knew!
I coach to make that path a little easier on the kids I work with. It's really that simple. To make it easier to love this game that has given me so much, mostly when I needed it most.
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