Coach to Take Vows After Team Tries for Title : Soccer: Brian McNeill’s under-16 team wants to ring in a Surf Cup championship as prelude to his on-the-field wedding.

A year ago, the girls on Brian McNeill’s under-16 San Dieguito Surf soccer team gave their coach a hint.

They bought him a ring to give to his girlfriend, Francine Marseille.

“He caught the drift, too,” said Alicia Engelhorn, who has been with the Surf for four years. “And they were going to get married if we won the State Cup (in April). But we got second.”

Today there will be no ifs. McNeill and Marseille will be wed on the same soccer field that only minutes earlier the Surf hopes to occupy during the championship game of its own tournament, the San Diego Surf Cup XII.

The competition is in its second weekend at the Rancho Santa Fe Polo Club.

“It’ll be fun if we win,” said Nikki Serlenga, the newest member of the club, having joined just before the tournament began. “That’ll be their wedding present from us.”

Serlenga wasn’t sure what to say should the team lose. Then again, no one’s really contemplating that possibility.

Since McNeill has taken over, the Surf has become one of the strongest girls soccer teams on the West Coast. Last year it won the San Diego Surf Cup, the Tempe Tournament, the Celtic Cup in Upland and the championship of the local Presidio League.

It lost the championship game of the State Cup to North Huntington Beach. Members of the Surf were hoping that North Huntington Beach would emerge from its pool this weekend so a rematch could take place, but North Huntington Beach lost two of its first three games and did not advance.

The Surf, meanwhile, won its three preliminary games without allowing a goal.

Now McNeill will have more than the semifinals and a possible championship game to get nervous about.

There are last-minute wedding preparations, too.

“We decided we wanted to get married and this would be as good a venue as any place else,” said McNeill.

“Soccer is our life,” said Marseille. “We met because of soccer, and every girl on our team is like a daughter. So this is the best way to share it with everybody.” Everyone will be involved, too. The girls on the team, in their grass-stained uniforms, will act as bridesmaids, and Josh Connerly, who plays on the Surf’s under-19 boys’ team, will give away the bride.

There’s a story behind that, too. Marseille tells the condensed version:

“Josh hung on to Brian’s ankles.”

The unedited version begins with McNeill and Marseille driving up to the Bakersfield President’s Cup three years ago. Things weren’t going well that day. The windshield on McNeill’s car shattered, delaying departure. In his haste to make up for lost time, McNeill then left without packing the team’s soccer balls. He had to double back.

All of which conspired to put the team’s convoy in the Los Angeles area about 5:30 p.m. That led to them discovering how incongruous the term “rush hour” is, and to McNeill and Marseille striking up their first conversation.

“So when traffic finally started to pick up,” Marseille said, “he asked me for my phone number.”

One problem--they were in two different cars, which is where Connerly came in. Someone had to anchor McNeill as he dangled out a car window and across Interstate 5 to reach for the phone number of his next date.

Now three years later and with his fiancee standing at his side, McNeill looks back and declares that the drive through a Los Angeles bottleneck wasn’t so bad after all.

“We won the tournament,” he said.