At USD, the Skills Don’t Equal Frills

Seamus McFadden laughed.

His ruddy Irish face is covered with laugh lines. A lot has happened to make him happy. A lot has happened to bring a mischievous twinkle to his eyes.

His USD Toreros are in the NCAA Division I Soccer Final Four, of all places. This is almost preposterous, all things considered. It doesn’t get any better than this, and it does not get any more unlikely than this.

USD will play at Davidson College in North Carolina today in one of two semifinals. Virginia will meet Duke in the other. The winners will meet Sunday for the championship, again at Davidson.

Seamus (pronounce that Shame-Us) McFadden was laughing as he recalled a conference call with the Final Four coaches.

Sure, Virginia was bringing its band.

Sure, Duke was bringing its band.

Davidson’s band was already there.

USD?

“We’re bringing a famous Irish tenor,” McFadden said. “Joseph Luck.”

Is this Notre Dame or USD?

USD, and make no mistake about it.

These are the Toreros, not the Fighting Irish, but they will take luck in whatever form they can find it.

However, luck has not gotten them to their current exalted and unexpected state. Skill has. Skill has taken them past Stanford, 3-0; UCLA, 2-1; and Indiana, 2-0. Skill has knocked off all these big guys with big-buck programs and plunked them down where they have never before visited.

The Final Four.

It has such a magical ring to it. It started with basketball, this Final Four stuff, but it’s the place to be when it comes to NCAA competition, except in football, of course. In all other sports, the Final Four is a New Year’s Day bowl game.

In a week in which the USD basketball team dismantled cross-town rival San Diego State, 85-60, the soccer team is the campus darling.

And these guys have gone all the way across country on what amounts to a half a tank of gas.

The Toreros are maybe half-funded in terms of scholarships. The players have only partially scholarships at a very expensive place to earn an education.

You think Stanford, UCLA and Indiana came to the party with partial scholarships?

That’s a laugh, and that’s another reason why McFadden is smiling.

“Hey,” he said, “Indiana came in here with like a 97-page media guide. It cracks me up.”

USD has no media guide. It has a neat little brochure, sort of like the junk mail you get every day from a life insurance company or maybe a real estate agent.

One of the things that brochure tells you is that enrollment is 6,000 and Torero Stadium holds 4,000. It does not tell you that Torero Stadium overflowed for the West Coast Conference showdown with Portland, a 3-0 victory, as well as the NCAA matches with Stanford and Indiana. That tells you what a hot item this soccer team is at Alcala Park.

The brochure explains that McFadden, a native of Donegal, Ireland, began the USD program in 1980. However, it does not detail what a struggle it has been.

“It was like hitting a wall,” McFadden said. “I could moan and groan or carry on.”

He chose getting better over being bitter. He had no scholarships to offer and the recruiting budget was about enough to cover postage.

“USD,” he said, “is a very academic school. We had to address everything we had to address academically before we could address athletics. That’s the way it was and that’s the right perspective.”

Indeed, after the victory over Indiana, senior standout Chugger Adair was surrounded by reporters who asked about this upcoming trip to the Final Four.

“The first thing I have to do,” Adair said, “is to go talk to my professors and see if they’ll let me go.”

One of McFadden’s favorite teams was the 1986 bunch, which had a 19-4-1 record with nary a scholarship to offer.

That was not all he liked about that team.

“It had a cumulative GPA of 3.4,” he said. “I have never had a player in my program who did not graduate. Not too many coaches can say that. I have kids delivering babies now. I have kids who went on to law school at Yale and USC and here. I have kids who went to Dartmouth pre-med. Those are things I get a kick out of.”

He was smiling again . . . naturally.

He is getting a kick out of this team too, with its seven pre-med majors and who knows how many babies to be delivered down the road.

Right now, however, it is a matter of trying to deliver an NCAA title.

“It’s always been a goal of mine to reach the Final Four,” McFadden said. “I’m not really worried because I think we can play with anybody. I’m not overconfident, I’m just saying we have the potential to play with anybody. We’ll show up and play the games. Anything can happen.”

Seamus McFadden was not laughing, hardly, but he had that twinkle in his eye.