A Forward Position in Territorial Dispute

When Frank Cubillos was moved from his forward position to a midfielder’s spot on the Cal State Northridge soccer team, steam poured from his ears. As far as Cubillos was concerned, this was the soccer equivalent of asking Michelangelo to work with aluminum siding or forcing Picasso to paint the bathroom walls with a roller.

He figured the guy who cast him as a midfielder would probably also cast Manute Bol as a Munchkin in a remake of “The Wizard of Oz.”

“I felt like I was the scapegoat,” Cubillos said of the move that occurred during a game against Cal State Bakersfield on Oct. 27. “We had lost a couple of games, and I was being punished for it by having to play out of position. He put me at midfield, but I knew I was a forward.”

But Coach Marwan Ass’ad had made the decision, and he was adamant about making it stick. Coaches of any sport seldom admit they made a mistake, and Ass’ad was not going to be an exception. He wanted Cubillos as a midfielder, and that was that. For about 15 minutes.

It took that long for Ass’ad to realize his decision to move Cubillos was a bad one.

“I’m a young coach and I’m still learning,” said Ass’ad, who is in his third season as head coach of the Matadors. “That was a good learning experience for me. I had said to myself, ‘This is what that forward position should do, this is what we need from this player,’ instead of looking at the individual talents of Frankie.

“That was a mistake. No question about it. We had lost a few games we shouldn’t have lost and I was upset. I guess I took it out on Frank.”

In the latter part of the same game against Bakersfield, Ass’ad moved Cubillos back to his forward spot. Cubillos responded with the game-winning goal, and the junior hasn’t come back to Earth since.

He’ll be in his familiar spot Saturday night at 7:30 when the Matadors take on Seattle Pacific at North Campus Stadium in the quarterfinals of the NCAA Division II soccer tournament, and that could cause major problems for the Falcons.

“One of the hardest things to do in soccer is to dribble by people, to take the ball right past a defender,” Ass’ad said. “Frank has the ability to do that. He is one of the best American kids I have ever seen in taking people on, one on one. When we can get Frank isolated on one defender, he’s like Dr. J in his prime. His feet are like magnets with the ball.

“If you try to get the ball away from him, he’ll make you look like a fool and he’ll blow right by you. For an American soccer player, that’s a very rare thing to find.

“But somehow, I didn’t see that right away. I was trying to make him more of a stationary player. I wasn’t using him right,” Ass’ad said.

And, if you listen to Cubillos’ side of the story, Ass’ad was making the game of soccer about as enjoyable as spleen surgery without anesthesia.

“He was really coming down hard on me,” Cubillos said. “He’d yell at me during practice all the time and he talked down to me and really cut me down. For the first time in my life, soccer wasn’t any fun.”

Ass’ad doesn’t deny that he came down much too hard on his player.

“The way I treated him was not good,” he said. “I didn’t show a lot of patience.”

When the wounds healed, though, Cubillos went on a late-season tear.

He is the second-leading scorer on the team behind forward John Tronson with 13 goals and 32 points, including one in last week’s 3-0 victory over Chapman in the first round of the playoffs. He had scored both goals in a 2-0 victory over Chapman early in November that clinched the California Collegiate Athletic Association championship for the Matadors.

“He is so much better now than he was,” Ass’ad said. “He has made that position his position. His teammates know exactly when to get him the ball and where to get him the ball, and he just explodes on people.

“Our best defender is Thor Lee and he’s usually unbeatable in one-on-one situations. Frankie and Thor go after each other now in practice, and what battles we’ve had out there. Frankie has made everyone on the team better. He has gotten so good and he’s making everyone else so much better, too.”

CSUN piled up a 16-3-1 regular season record, losing to Division I UNLV in the championship game of the Rebel Classic. The Matadors then lost twice in the same week--to Chapman and Dominguez Hills--prior to the Bakersfield game, when the team was threatening to come unglued faster than a $6 pair of shoes.

“That was a bad time,” Ass’ad admitted. “We were all frustrated, and I was looking for an easy answer to the problems. I thought Frankie was one of the problems. As it turned out, he wasn’t.

“A lot of kids would have quit the team right then. But Frankie stuck with it and kept playing, even though he knew I was making a mistake.”

With the fire that Ass’ad lit under his soccer shorts now just a smoldering memory, Cubillos says the crisis may have done everyone some good.

“I’m an emotional player, and I blew up a few times during those few days,” he said. “But I think the outcome was for the better. We talked it out and I’m playing so much better now. I take what happened as a plus. I think it brought out the best in me. He apologized to me and told me I’d be his forward from that point on, and it seemed like the clouds just cleared away.

“Now I’m having more fun than ever playing soccer. Saturday night’s game is the biggest game of my life, but I’m playing my best soccer ever and the team is playing its best, too. We all know what we’re capable of accomplishing.”