Wiesner Aims for Smooth Machine
Brian Wiesner drives a 1983 Volvo sedan he bought at an auction and nursed to health with his hit-or-miss mechanical skills.
“I’ve redone the front end and put in a new [transmission],” said Wiesner, beginning his fourth year as coach of the Cal State Northridge women’s soccer team. “I learned by tinkering on old cars in the junkyard. You show up on a Saturday morning with your overalls and your tools and you find out what works and what doesn’t.”
Wiesner’s experience with rebuilding jobs should come in handy, because he’s got a whopper on his hands with the Matadors.
Northridge, which opens practice today and hosts UC Santa Barbara in its opener Sept. 1, is 14-40-4 in its three-year history. The Matadors are 6-31-1 in the last two campaigns and won two games last season, when they were one of NCAA’s worst Division I teams.
“I thought we had a dynamite first year and the last two were just mind-boggling,” Wiesner said.
With his contract expiring in December, Wiesner knows his team needs to improve significantly or he’ll have plenty of time to tear apart cars.
“I think we need to get to the conference tournament or very close,” Wiesner said. The top four teams in the eight-team Big Sky Conference qualify for the postseason tournament.
Brian Swanson, a Northridge assistant athletic director, said he has been disappointed by the team’s showing.
“We feel the resources [Wiesner] has had should have been sufficient to move the program along more than it has,” Swanson said. “We want to be competitive in the conference this year and next year target towards winning it.”
The Matadors were so unimpressive last season that midway through a home game, a group of 12-year-old girls from a local club soccer team left in disgust.
Wiesner’s 1997 team lost nine games by one goal and five in overtime. He attributes that performance to a combination of inexperience, injuries and bad luck. He’s also quick to make an additional point.
“Lousy coaching,” he said. “I have to take my pill on that.”
Last season began inauspiciously when goalkeeper Nikki Thomas, an all-conference transfer from Detroit-Mercy, backed out of her letter of intent. During the season, poor conditioning contributed to players missing a combined total of 57 games with injuries.
“It’s really hard to adjust your training to the players’ fitness because then you never meet your objectives,” Wiesner said. “If the players show up fit this year and we can get on with soccer business, I think we’ll be very competitive.”
Jenny Wanner, a senior midfielder, said Wiesner’s decision-making, more than the players’ fitness, contributed to the failures of last season.
“Brian did a lot of little experiments last year that just didn’t work,” Wanner said. “He tries little sneaky [strategies], things that he thinks only he knows and no other coach knows. But last year they were really unsuccessful and a lot of the players blamed him.”
Senior defender Pam Karbowski has a more charitable appraisal of Wiesner.
“I’ve had a great soccer experience under him,” Karbowski said. “He makes sure the game’s still fun but that we know what we need to know.”
For the last two years, coaches and parents of regional high school players have contended that Wiesner failed to recruit top-notch talent. Wiesner points out that 12 of the 30 players on the Northridge roster attended high schools in the region.
“I don’t think there’s anybody we’ve missed that we had a legitimate shot at,” said Wiesner, whose team awards the NCAA-maximum 12 scholarships. “We can’t wine and dine high-profile recruits. We can’t impress them other than take them over to my [office in a] trailer and hope that the air conditioning’s on.”
Wiesner faces an hour-long commute when his day at Northridge is done. Last season he had plenty of time to dwell on the mounting losses. With his job on the line this season, he touts positive thinking.
“If I start to think about what happens if we lose, right when I get that thought, I start thinking about the games we’re going to win,” Wiesner said.