Birth of a Salesman : Life-Threatening Car Crash Leads to New Career for Former Toros Soccer Coach

Jeff Friedman can look back now with some consolation to the time he smashed a car into a big tree on Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa.

The cause of the 1984 accident is still unknown. Friedman, then the men’s soccer coach at Cal State Dominguez Hills, hit the tree at 50 miles an hour. He does not remember a thing about the crash, although he suffered major internal injuries and a dislocated hip. He was in traction for two months in a hospital.

“I didn’t go to the bathroom or even roll over during that time,” he said.

Yet Friedman, now 35, took solace in the fact that his time in the hospital gave him an opportunity to rethink career goals.

Although he attempted a comeback at Dominguez Hills, he soon realized that life as a coach was not for him and he resigned. He had other things to consider, like the birth of triplet daughters to wife Lynn the year before his accident, or the fact that his job at Dominguez Hills was only part time, with little chance at being reclassified to full-time status.

All in all, thought Friedman, there is more to life than this.

“I had a lot of time to decide what to do,” he said of his time in traction. “It was hard to give up coaching. I tried to come back for a month or two, but the accident--I was so close to death--I began to think what should I be doing?”

So Friedman, who took the Toros into the NCAA Division 2 quarterfinals in 1982, became an upholstery supply salesman. He lives in Newport Beach now and passes that tree on his way to work.

“Doesn’t faze me a bit,” he said.

The teams he put together at Dominguez Hills fazed many an opponent. In five years (1980-84) Friedman compiled a 50-31-8 record. In 1982, his best season, the Toros were 18-3-1. Friedman was voted California Collegiate Athletic Assn. Soccer Coach of the Year. The Toros were rated the best Division 2 team on the West Coast.

“It was an enjoyable time,” he said.

Toro Athletic Director Dan Guerrero credits Friedman with bolstering the image of the school’s athletic program.

“It was an important time for the university,” Guerrero said of the 1982 playoff appearance. “For the first time people on this campus took notice and saw that we had a legit athletic program.”

Friedman says the past is behind him. Occasionally, however, he does look back.

“I miss the slaps on the back, the ‘Hey, good job,’ the winning, and there is some ego involved, as well, when you are doing well,” he said.

“But now I’m coaching my daughters. They occupy a good deal of my time.”

Guerrero called Friedman “a role model.”

“He was a low-key guy but intense on the field,” Guerrero said.

Recruiting star players to Dominguez Hills wasn’t easy, Friedman said. As he lay in his hospital bed, he questioned if he would ever be up to handling the work he put into the quest for good athletes each year.

“It’s a tough place to recruit,” he said. “If you are a bright student, if you have the grades, you are not going to go to Dominguez. . . . But it’s a good school for those who cannot afford private schools. And it’s a small state university with a lot to offer.”

The South Bay, he said, is a “hotbed of soccer,” but he found it increasingly difficult to recruit players from the area because they had either the grades to go elsewhere or would have difficulty going straight from high school to a state university because of poor grades. That paradox was another reason he chose to leave coaching.

Friedman played basketball at Marshall High School, then tried to make the team at California Western College. But “there aren’t too many guys 5-foot, 9-inches that can play basketball,” he said. When Friedman was cut from tryouts, he found himself at loose ends.

“I still wanted to be competitive,” he said.

So he turned to soccer. He played for four years at Cal Western and after receiving a bachelor of arts there was appointed the soccer coach at U.S. International University in San Diego, where he also gained a masters degree in 1976.

At U.S. International, Friedman’s teams were made up primarily of foreign players. He said he learned new ways to approach the game from them. At Dominguez Hills he applied many training techniques that were in use by World Cup teams. One idea was a family concept that had players train in a remote location in the Southern California mountains. The team would spend the day running in the hills and then jog to a desert field below to scrimmage.

It is training, ironically, that Friedman misses most. Maybe it was the closeness of it all, he said.

Like one big family. The family theme seems to run through Friedman’s life, an occurrence that some aspects of his coaching career may have interfered with.