Enthusiasm Receives a Red Card

There were 1,122 people at Cal State Fullerton Sunday to watch an NCAA Division I tournament men’s soccer game. The day was beautiful and the setting idyllic, 10,000 seats in a stadium that had been built for football just before football was abandoned.

Cal State Fullerton and San Diego played a taut match that ended in a 2-1 upset by the visiting Toreros. The Titans, who had been seeded seventh in the NCAA postseason extravaganza, had beaten San Diego, 5-2, earlier this season.

But there was little atmosphere on this sweet soccer afternoon, not much enthusiasm or rabid cheering or even much disappointment when the home team, even as it dominated the second half, ended its season.

Titan Coach Al Mistri, a native Italian, says he remembers when college soccer attracted “a couple of girlfriends and couple of dogs and was played in a meadow,” and, except for the improvement of the playing fields, not much seems to have changed as far as interest in, or excitement about, college soccer.

Mistri, who has been coaching the Fullerton men’s team since 1981 and the women’s team since 1993, and Seamus McFadden, a white-haired Irishman who speaks with a charming lilt and has coached the Toreros for 20 years, have been trying to force-feed Americans their own particular and European devotion to this game that can be beautifully intriguing or dull and stultifying.

Quite honestly, McFadden said Sunday even as he couldn’t quite rid himself of the gentle smile of a winner, he had hoped, in all these years, that the level of college soccer and the interest in it, would have been more dramatic.

“The progression hasn’t been quite as quick as I’d hoped,” McFadden said, “nor as dramatic. It’s hard to say why. I’ve stayed in it [coaching San Diego] so long because I love the game, I learned to play the game in America and I want to instill the game and teach the game. But I wish it would move forward faster, yes.”

At a place like Fullerton it would seem that soccer would thrive, that it would bring exuberant students out to cheer a team that truly is something of a national power.

The sport certainly benefited greatly from the building of the new stadium when, after playing only four games in the new stadium, the football team was eliminated. There are chairback seats and plenty of concession stands, nice bathrooms, a huge press box, lots of radio booths. But there weren’t many students at Sunday’s game. The crowd seemed mainly parents and relatives of players.

Mistri says that while the talent level has absolutely improved in his time as coach--”you used to get one or two good players per team and now you get seven or eight,”--Mistri laughs when asked whether his beloved game got a boost out of the World Cup, the game’s preeminent event, having been played in the United States in 1994.

“Not at all,” Mistri says. “Maybe it brought some more money to the game, but the passion for the game? That did not translate.”

Mistri wishes soccer were taken more seriously at the lower levels. He dismisses too much of youth soccer “as a lot of moms running around handing out oranges and a lot of shouting,” and he wishes that soccer took itself more seriously. “Soccer seems to have become the sport for everyone,” Mistri says. “Everyone is supposed to get to play. In basketball and football, the best play. People find their proper level sooner. The attitude in soccer is that everybody gets equal chance to play.”

And most of all he wishes that there were more time for college soccer. “We need to play more games,” Mistri says, “and have more time for practice.”

The Titans played 21 games this season, including this single playoff game. Mistri says he too often will lose good players a year early. “If guys have a one-percent chance of making it in a pro league they leave,” Mistri says, “because they just don’t get to play enough in college.”

Which is not to say that Mistri, or McFadden either, are discouraged.

“This is light years ahead of where you saw college soccer when I started coaching it,” Mistri says. “You saw some good soccer today, not all the time, but some. It was well and tightly played sometimes and this would have never happened even 10 years ago. The game is maturing. The quality of the player is significantly better.

“But it is not in the fabric of the nation at all. Maybe in the next generation but I don’t know. I just don’t know.”