Welcome to the Blog

Welcome to Coach P’s Soccer Blog! Writing whatever I feel like whenever I feel like it about the world’s most popular sport is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Now that I have retired from coaching, refereeing and being a club administrator, I have the time – when my day job as a lawyer permits.

About this blog

I plan to write about whatever comes to mind in the world of soccer – maybe a club game, or a news item from a European league, and a lot from Philadelphia’s new pro teams, the Union and Independence. A lot of content here will be my opinion – and you’ll know when it is – and a lot plain news reporting. I hope it will be objective and professionally written and that it will provoke thought or at least be interesting and entertaining to a soccer fan.

Eventually, when I figure things out, I’ll have more organization and specific pages by topic, pictures and various soccer links.

I won’t pretend to be comprehensive. I won’t have the time, the resources or the desire to fully cover any one league, team or age group.

And you will often find references to songs in my writing. It’s a habit I have, but I find I am not alone. I have found that Dan Shaugnessy, excellent sports columnist for the Boston Globe, has sprinkled references to songs in his work.

About me

First and foremost I am a lawyer and have been for 31 years. But before I was a lawyer I was a journalist, and that has never left me.

I was married for almost 37 years to Louise Harbach, who died on 12/11/06. Our two kids, Kirsten, 30, and Scott, 27, both played through high school age. Kirsten is still on the roster of FC Hansa in Minneapolis but is on the D/L until October when she is expecting her first child and my first grandchild. Her husband, Chris, a good player himself, is still active.

I grew up in the Philadelphia area – always a soccer hotbed - and played from about age 8 when we kicked a ball around after school until I retired from the South Jersey “Old Men’s League at age 45.” Along the way were stops on teams in high school, clubs, college and in the Army.

I never played very well – I’m short (5’ 5”, but so is Tomas Hässler and he earned 100 caps for Germany) and not super fast. But I could run all day – and had the desire.

Along the lines of the comedian who said he wouldn’t want to belong to any club which would have him as a member, any team I could make could not have been very good, and our Gettysburg College team was not very good in the late ‘60s. In fairness to us, we had an athletic director who thought nothing of scheduling us to play the defending NCAA champions (Navy) in the fall of 1965, along with Penn State, Temple and other schools now in NCAA Division 1. I once asked him why he didn’t schedule the football team against Notre Dame. “They’d get killed,” he replied. Yeah, well we got killed by Navy and the rest.

My coaching career began before my own two kids were born - in the early-1970s when I coached a U11 boys team in Southampton, PA for two years – through U12. Starting law school began in 1974, my coaching for the time and eventually curtailed my soccer journalism. But to stay in the game I signed up to be a referee and studied with Vic Scarangelli, an NASL official based in Philadelphia. During law school I refereed in Philadelphia, then afterwards in NJ.

I returned to coaching with my own kids in the town league in Medford, and then with the Medford Strikers where I stayed long after they moved on. I helped coach girls state cup champions in 1994 (girls U15), 1995 (girls U16), 1997 (girls U15) and 1998 (girls U16). During this time there was the thrill of watching my son win a State Cup at U14 and going undefeated at regionals. My second girls team (which didn’t have a name other than Strikers ‘81’82) produced 17 Division 1 college players and Carli Lloyd, a mainstay on the U.S. National Team and the Chicago Red Stars of the Women’s Professional League.

And most recently I ended up six years with a team that was like a second family to me, the Medford Strikers Xtreme (MSX). These girls are all in college now and you will read more about them on this blog. Suffice it to say for now that they have always been a big part of my life and I look forward to watching them play in college and beyond.

I’ve done some soccer journalism, first as a stringer and free-lancer. During college I covered the Philadelphia Spartans of the old North American Soccer League for a weekly paper in Philadelphia, then when the Atoms came to town in 1974 I wrote an article for Philadelphia Magazine. The team was owned by Philadelphia builder Tom McCloskey, who was talked into buying the franchise by his friend, Lamar Hunt, in Dallas.

The Atoms were upset with me when I described in the article how McCloskey didn’t even know the size of a soccer goal – he thought they were like lacrosse goals. But when the Atoms concluded their inaugural season by winning the NASL championship at Texas Stadium outside Dallas, McCloskey came up to me in the locker room, shook my hand and said with a smile, “Not bad for a guy who didn’t know the size of the goals, huh?” I covered the team all season for the league’s magazine based in Toronto.

At about this time I got together with Tom Breen and Don McKee, fellow reporters at the Courier-Post in South Jersey and we put out a magazine called Soccer Weekly, that journalistically was first rate, but was under-financed and lacked an aggressive sales and circulation staff. It lasted one season. I also covered the NCAA final four (now called the “College Cup”) in Philadelphia in 1976 for the Inquirer, and in 1978 was the Cosmos beat writer for the Trenton Times, which is where I got to meet Pele, Beckenbauer, and even Mick Jagger, who hung out in the Cosmos lockerroom.

Since then my soccer writing has been confined to team newsletters, the Medford Strikers website and the Xtreme’s website, still active and still the best around, thorough the efforts of John Makowski. (http://www.eteamz.com/medfordstrikersxtreme/)

Which brings me full circle to my motivation in doing this blog: a chance to write about the world’s most popular sport: one that has started wars (Honduras and El Salvador in 1969) and stopped wars (Nigerian civil war stopped in 1967 to allow both sides to watch Pele play in Lagos; 1914, German and British troops call truce and play soccer at Christmas); one that moves entire nations like no other, one that is called “the Beautiful Game” by the Brazilians.

So if you’re a soccer fan, check back and I hope you like what you read. Let me know.

Wayne Partenheimer, a/k/a Coach P