IN 1910, HARRY MALONEY, who would coach six sports at Stanford, created a men’s soccer team. Now, more than a century later, coach Jeremy Gunn has Stanford on the verge of its first national title.
The Cardinal (17-2-2) plays Akron (18-3-2) in the College Cup semifinals on Friday at 5:30 p.m. PT (ESPNU) in Kansas City, Kan. The winner plays Clemson or Syracuse in Sunday’s final.
The soccer that Stanford plays today would hardly be recognized a century ago. For years, men’s soccer was a varsity sport with more of a club mentality. The days of playing home matches on Saturday mornings against small-college teams with a few fans lining the field and a few others in rickety wooden bleachers are not that far removed – about 30 years.
But as the program has grown with the level of play and as the interest in the sport has exploded, Stanford soccer has gone through a more high-profile set of highs and lows – two NCAA finals, but struggles in other years.
When Gunn arrived in 2012, Stanford was coming off a 6-10-2 season and had but one NCAA tournament berth in nine years. He came from a unique background, growing up in Harrogate, England -- voted “the happiest place to live” in Britain -- and played in the youth systems of lower-division sides before coming to the U.S. to play for CSU Bakersfield.
The Roadrunners were 1-78-3 in conference in the years just before Gunn's freshman year and as the program transitioned to coach Simon Tobin. In 10 years together, with Gunn as a player and later an assistant coach, Bakersfield won four conference championships and an NCAA Division II title. Gunn still holds the Bakersfield career record for goals (49) -- ahead of current U.S. national-team forward Gyasi Zardes, who is second with 38 -- as well as assists (36) and points (128).
After Gunn moved on to his first head-coaching job, at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, the Skyhawks went on to reach three Division II national finals and won one NCAA championship. At UNC Charlotte in 2011, Gunn coached the 49ers into the Division I College Cup final.
Influenced heavily by Tobin and Arsenal FC youth coach Andy McDermid among others, Gunn learned to build a program. At a place like Bakersfield or Fort Lewis, it meant forging something out of nothing.
“We weren’t given anything, so you had to learn to do everything right, recruiting for instance, connecting with players,” Gunn said.
“People will come to Stanford regardless of who the soccer coach is,” Gunn said. “So, if you call somebody up, they might spend a half an hour persuading you to take them. But starting out at Bakersfield and Fort Lewis, you had to spend an hour trying to convince them to visit. And after they said ‘No,’ you’d go back and call a month later, and a month after that, and a month after that.”
Gunn still loves the challenge of building, creating and molding a program. By the time he got to The Farm, his blueprints had long been drawn, from those years in California’s Central Valley, under the shadow of Colorado’s majestic San Juan Mountains or on a wooded campus in North Carolina.
“You got to build things and you got to see the wonderful excitement of building something from nothing,” Gunn said. “We built great crowds, we put lights on the field, we dug the trenches. When we first started up, we were doing the extra watering on the field, learning how to get the field striped.”
At Stanford, the first thing Gunn asked for was trust, but he had to convince players, parents, and fans to believe in him, to have faith.
“When you’re all new, change is difficult and can be uncomfortable,” he said. “As a coach, you have to have a belief in yourself that you’re going to set off in the right direction and be unwavering in the support of that direction. All the time, people are going to ask questions and be willing to veer off in different ways. You just have to have that strength and conviction to say, ‘This is what we’re going to do. It’s going to work, and it will work.’”
Shortly after Gunn’s hiring, football coach David Shaw paid him a visit.
“What do you need to know?” Shaw asked.
Shaw described how he recruited the most competitive players he could find, and that hard workers were the cornerstone of his program.
In Gunn’s office at the time was a player whom Gunn felt was less than fully committed. That player heard Shaw reinforce the same things Gunn was saying. It felt like a small victory.
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WHEN MALONEY STARTED the program long ago, he was used to creating teams from scratch. He was Stanford’s first varsity coach in men’s basketball, boxing, fencing and men’s soccer. He coached the men’s soccer team for 29 seasons between 1911 and 1943, and his 104 soccer coaching victories remain No. 2 at Stanford.
Maloney created a club team in 1910, winning a league title against area semipro outfits before losing to a team called the Vampires in the semifinals of a cup long forgotten. A year later, the intercollegiate varsity program launched with a series of matches against Cal.
With travel limited to the Bay Area for much of its history, Stanford had to find opponents in any form. Among them: the Barbarian Club, something called Sunday-League (which routed Stanford 9-1), Chinese YMCA, Palo Alto American Legion, Sons of Norway, San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the Naval Postgraduate School.
It wasn’t until the 1930s when Stanford turned to a mostly collegiate schedule, with the odd match against Balboa High School, the British Sailors, and even San Quentin (yes, the prison). Recruiting was much different in those days. It usually meant knocking on the doors of the international houses on campus.
Stanford’s first NCAA berth came in 1962, during the reign of King Klas, Klas Bergman. The Swede remains the only men’s soccer player inducted into the Stanford Hall of Fame.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s when Stanford dropped junior college teams off the schedule for good. The school also began to develop its’ first professional players as the growth of the game coincided with the establishment of the North American Soccer League, America’s first top-line pro league. Greg Delgado and Dan McNevin are believed to be Stanford’s first pros, playing in 1980 for the indoor San Francisco Fog and outdoor Edmonton Drillers, respectively.
The first NCAA victory didn’t come until 1998, under Bobby Clark, who guided the Cardinal into the NCAA final the same year. Stanford reached the final again in 2002, this time under Bret Simon. Players like Ryan Nelsen, who would go on to a career and captainship in the English Premier League, and Simon Elliott, Todd Dunivant, and Chad Marshall brought Stanford to an elite level.
Now, Stanford men’s soccer is in its 102nd season and showing signs that it may join the 22 varsity programs on campus that have won national championships.
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THE FOUNDATION OF the program was created on competitiveness. That was the first step, and the first thing that Gunn asked of his men.
“if you’re less skilled, you have to compete harder,” Gunn said. “You’ve got to make sure you take care of what you can. Your choice of how hard you work is a personal choice. How good you are, is not necessarily a choice. Your choice to work as hard as you can, is a 100 percent proof of buy-in.
“That’s the gatekeeper of the program for each player. You have to show us as a group, show the other players, that you have bought in and you’re going to work as hard. That’s flat-out saying “I’m all in.” No dipping your toe. “I’m all in.”
Stanford indeed improved in 2012, to 9-8-1 overall, and 5-4-1 in the Pac-12, earning Stanford’s first winning conference record in six years. Every match was a battle, and that’s exactly what Gunn wanted.
“In soccer, there’s different ways of competing and winning,” Gunn said. “You can be the team that’s more dominant on the ball -- we weren’t quite there. Let’s focus on the foundation, and let’s make sure that everybody knows that when they play against Stanford, they’re going to be in for a tough fight. That, I think, was a truly attainable goal. Never mind the wins and losses.
“We’re going to outcompete you and be tougher than you. We’re going to be mentally stronger and fight harder than you. You can make sure that everybody knows that it’s tough to play against Stanford.”
Holdovers like Adam Jahn, Hunter Gorskie, JJ Koval and Aaron Kovar epitomized that approach. All bought in, and eventually launched their own pro careers.
The next step was defense. In developing a program, Gunn learned that it’s too risky to build an offense ahead of a defense, because it leaves the defense too vulnerable. A sound approach is to build from the back.
“Players will like you more if you start on the attacking principles,” Gunn said. “But if you make forward progress, just focus on the attacking, you’re probably not going to want to tighten up the ship defensively.”
Stanford improved to 10-7-4 in 2013, to 13-3-3 in 2014 – a No. 1 ranking during the season and its first conference title since 2001. This year, Stanford captured its second consecutive Pac-12 title and has a squad that features Jordan Morris, the first active college player to join the full U.S. national team in 20 years. Senior co-captains Brandon Vincent in defense and Ty Thompson in midfield joined Morris, the Hermann Trophy favorite, on the All-Far West Region first team.
The defense settled in and the skill level grew. A team that scored 20 goals and allowed 26 in 2011 has scored 39 and allowed only 15 in 2015.
“What I’m really proud of is we do have amazing balance,” Gunn said. “We have that tough competitive defensive ability and yet we’re also a very good attacking team. It’s hard to be good at both. You can be more defense-minded, but you’re going to struggle to be attacking. Open, flair attacking and you leave yourself exposed. You look at this group, what really is pleasing is seeing the great balance we have.”
Can Stanford win a title? In 101 previous seasons, it’s never been done.
“There are some incredible people, coaches and players that have gone through the program,” Gunn said. “They are part of a wonderful legacy here. We don’t have the national championships in this sport to brag about that the other sports at Stanford have. But I know the players will do everything they can to try to change that.”
Either way, Harry Maloney would be proud.