Sigi’s SUCCESS STORY
To the crowd gathered outside the locker rooms at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, it was a sudden and surprising development.
Without warning, the swinging doors to the Galaxy’s quarters burst open, each half slamming loudly against the concrete wall. Out stumbled a laughing Sigi Schmid, prominent paunch to the fore, the back of his shirt and trousers drenched in champagne.
Behind him, still wielding the bubbly bottle, came midfielder Clint Mathis and a cluster of beaming players.
So much for the end of Schmid’s first regular season as a Major League Soccer coach.
As happened so often during his 19 years at UCLA, the former Bruin mentor’s debut season as a professional coach brought with it a conference title. Better yet, the MLS championship is still his for the taking.
When Galaxy owner Phil Anschutz brought Schmid in to replace Octavio Zambrano five games into the 1999 season, many wondered how the German-born but American-raised Schmid would adapt to the different demands of a young and unproven pro league.
Schmid had no doubts at all.
“The only reservation, really,” he said, “was that when you take over a team in midseason, you don’t have a chance to go through preseason, to experiment or really get involved in team building and things like that. But in terms of wanting to coach in MLS and wanting to be the coach of the Galaxy, I had absolutely no reservations.”
Going into Game 2 of the Western Conference playoffs on Sunday against the Colorado Rapids in Denver, Schmid is 19-9 as an MLS coach, with a one-game lead in the best-of-three series. Success has been immediate for the 50-year-old who won four NCAA championship at UCLA, where he went 322-63-33.
Immediate but not automatic.
In a sense, Schmid has been studying the game since he first kicked a ball around the parks and playgrounds of Los Angeles in the 1950s. He reads every soccer book he can get hold of, watches every videotape and attends every match.
He is a student and a fan, loving the lore of the game and its history and characters as much as the actual play itself.
Beneath all that learning, however, lies a solid foundation, a work ethic that leads him to expect as much from everyone else as he does from himself.
“I think what really determines your personality is your background,” he said. “I had a German mother and a German father who were very demanding of me. The way I was raised with my mom is that, ‘If I have to tell you to do it, it’s already too late.’
“We had a delicatessen [on 15th Street in Santa Monica] and I was the one who ran the deli when she went on vacation. So I often worked for her. What you ended up learning very quickly is you became very observant.”
More than anything else, what has shaped Schmid as a coach is observing and interacting with other coaches, not all of them in soccer. All those years at UCLA, including as a student, gave him the opportunity to closely watch John Wooden.
“Everybody has this view of him as being this quiet man, soft-spoken, never raises his voice,” Schmid said. “But he was extremely intense and demanding. I don’t know if ‘fearsome’ is the right word, but people jumped when he talked to them.
“Sometimes it would be a whisper, but the whisper was to get their attention, and the words that he used were pretty direct. He wasn’t an indirect person, so you learned that part of it. And the attention to fundamentals, that fundamentals are always the basis of your game. There’s no foundation without them.”
Long before Wooden, and the Lakers’ Pat Riley, from whom he also learned, there were others who left their imprint.
“One of the two coaches who had probably the biggest influence on my life was a guy named George ‘Scotty’ Kay, who got inducted into the AYSO Hall of Fame at the same time I did,” Schmid said. “He was my coach from the time I was 12 until I was 17. He was a Scottish guy. A small guy. He was a schoolboy international for Scotland. He had played left wing for Blackpool for a couple of seasons when [legendary English star] Stanley Matthews was on the right.
“He was very fundamental. We used to train at this park that had a chain-link fence. Before you could start training, you had to hit the pole 10 times with the ball. Just for shooting accuracy. It used to be just your right foot and you were 10 yards away. Then it was your left foot. Then he put you 15 yards away. There were some guys who spent half the practice there trying to hit that pole 10 times. But we all learned. Our entire team learned how to hit a ball.
“He was very disciplined. One game, his son screamed at the referee, so at halftime he washed out his son’s mouth with soap. That was the whole halftime talk.
“But he taught me a lot of things about fundamentals and just being very disciplined and being demanding. That if you do something, do it well.”
Then there was Max Wosniak.
“He was the first coach of the L.A. Toros [in the 1960s] and even coached the U.S. national team,” Schmid said. “He had gotten his German coaching license. He was Polish and had played on the Polish Olympic team. He showed me a lot about dedication. He was the one who really taught me about taking opponents out of their comfort zone and having a plan for each game and knowing what you wanted to do.”
Schmid had perhaps his most worthwhile experience in 1984, during the Los Angeles Olympic Games.
“My most important learning laboratory has been observation,” he said. “In the ’84 Olympics, I had a great job where I was in charge of all the team coordinators, so I got to go and watch all the teams practice--Brazil, Yugoslavia, France, Germany, Italy. Those, to me, were invaluable experiences.”
That’s the way it long has been for Schmid, always talking soccer, always adding to his store of knowledge and stories, whether as an assistant under Bora Milutinovic on the 1994 U.S. World Cup team, as coach of the U.S. under-20 national team at the World Championships in Nigeria this year, or simply interacting with other top coaches.
“Just every evening sitting down over a beer or a cup of coffee and talking soccer for two hours, that’s where I learn the most,” he said.
Slowly, Schmid said, American players are learning that soccer is about more than simply the last match or the next one, about more than new contracts or new endorsement opportunities.
There is more than a century of history there, all shared by a global community of players, coaches, referees and administrators with an intense passion for the sport.
Last week, just before the MLS playoffs began, Schmid and assistant Ralph Perez took the Galaxy players to La Jolla to train in a different environment for a few days.
“On the bus down there, we watched a Manchester United tape and then we watched goals from the ’98 World Cup,” Schmid said.
But not all the players think much of spending hours watching, say, European Champions League games, no matter how good.
“If you polled our team, probably half the team wants to be there and the other half couldn’t care less about watching the game,” Schmid said. “That happens in other places too, but I think overall, the American player is more isolated in his view of soccer and I don’t think that’s good. I think we should be more aware.”
Galaxy Notes
Salvadoran soccer officials announced they have suspended midfielder Mauricio Cienfuegos from the national team for one year, citing disciplinary problems. Cienfuegos can still play for the Galaxy.
MLS Playoffs
GALAXY vs. COLORADO
Galaxy leads best-of-three series, 1-0
GAME 1
Galaxy, 3-0
SUNDAY
at Colorado, Noon
WEDNESDAY
Rose Bowl, 7:30-x
x-if necessary
