This Bruin Puts His Cubs First

It is two days before his NCAA quarterfinal game, two hours before a team meeting, and the coach of the nation’s second-ranked college soccer team has plenty on his mind.

Specifically, a potful of onions.

“Hey, Kyle, you gonna eat?”

Sigi Schmid of UCLA stirs the onions beneath four steaks, turns and tosses the salad, reaches up in the cupboard for some plates.

The counter top is cramped, the cook is unshaven and wearing soccer sweats, but the room feels like a quilt, and 11-year-old Kyle eagerly walks to the table.

Together, they dine. The father cuts the son’s meat. The son shakes his head at the father’s jokes.

Schmid covers the leftovers for his two older sons, rushes out of their modest Torrance home with Kyle, drops him off at soccer practice after a carpool mix-up, arrives at his own team meeting 15 minutes late.

Heading for that meeting, stuck in traffic, Schmid leans his head back, fingers the St. Christopher medal on his necklace, and exhales.

He’s a divorced dad who insisted on shared custody of the children.

That custody has been granted to him for his busiest six months of the year, the winter soccer season.

While others in soccer’s Elite Eight have funneled their lives toward the sole purpose of winning the national championship, Schmid is trying to do it while acting as a single parent in a household with three boys.

A coach with a Ralphs Club card on his key chain.

A coach who folds laundry while making recruiting calls.

A coach who has a jar of cookies by his sink, and good test papers hanging on the refrigerator, and three boys who can’t believe the miles he walks just to be their father.

He will not be late for UCLA’s 1 p.m. quarterfinal game today against Clemson at Spaulding Field. But he will be there only after he has made sure his boys have had breakfast and put on clean clothes and walked into their days like men.

During regular-season games, the child sitting next to him on the bench is Kyle.

On some regular-season weekends, he schedules UCLA practices early so he can attend a game played by 15-year-old Kurt’s club soccer team.

Well, actually, he does more than attend. Don’t tell UCLA, but he coaches Kurt’s team.

Which is a little like Steve Spurrier moonlighting at Pop Warner.

“My dad has taught me that fathers need to be with their children, to care for them, to let them know they love them,” said Kurt, 15 going on 30. “My dad will stop sometimes and say, ‘Hey, you know I love you.’ And we know.”

Back in the car, in the traffic, his team already watching film in distant Westwood, Schmid fingers the medal and sighs.

Since the start of the season, he can’t remember the last time he has had more than 10 minutes of quiet when he wasn’t in the bathroom. He can’t remember the last time he carried on an uninterrupted phone conversation before 10 p.m.

His life is cluttered, his 44th year is sprinting past, and he knows that when he gets home, whoever was supposed to take out the trash probably didn’t.

“Yeah, I have one regret,” Schmid says. “That I can’t have my children with me always.”

*

This is not the story of a hero. Sigi Schmid wouldn’t cop to that.

Thousands of women are doing exactly what he is doing, and without half the help he has from ex-wife Kathy, his father and his part-time cook.

This should not be a story at all. Sigi Schmid would agree to that.

But when it comes to divorce, many men leave, or see their children only on weekends, never dreaming of serving as their primary caregiver.

Just ask Kurt.

“A lot of my friends whose parents are divorced, they live with their mom, and their dad lives across town and just visits,” he said. “I like it better this way.”

Schmid is not the sort who leaves.

He moved here from Germany at 4 and grew up with his extended family in a crowded Los Angeles duplex. He played soccer at UCLA, then earned his way through graduate school by running his mom’s delicatessen in Santa Monica. He was not afraid of hard work. He understood goals.

When he was married in 1976, he dreamed he would always stay that way.

But in pursuit of his soccer coaching dreams, he worked harder and traveled farther. He was named head coach at UCLA in 1980, went 18-2-2 that first year, and never slowed.

Because he was gone so much, it took him and Kathy six months to baptize Kyle. He remembered a school essay in which oldest son Erik, now 18, wished his father would be home more.

By the time he won his second national championship in 1990, the feeling was more relief than reward. Two years later, he and Kathy were separated.

“It surprised me,” he said. “But it made me think.”

And it made him change. He decided his children would be first. He remained in the house where the children were growing up, and asked that they be allowed to stay there for half the year. Erik later even chose to live there full time.

“Us divorced parents, we try to pretend about our children and say, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad,’ ” Schmid said. “But it’s hard on them. I couldn’t make it any harder.”

With Kathy living nearby and constantly on call when the boys aren’t living with her, with two grandparents in the area and a cook who drops by, Schmid has made it work.

With some stubbed toes, of course.

He has missed practices to nurse sick children.

He has rushed home after exciting games to make unexciting dinners.

He gets in more fights at clothing stores over “beyond baggy” pants than with referees.

Used to be, he was proudest of names like Cobi Jones, Brad Friedel, Joe-Max Moore and Paul Caligiuri, all former Bruins, all U.S. World Cup players.

Today, he talks more about Erik, Kurt and Kyle.

Not to mention, makes a mean steak and Potato Buds.