I paid $5 for entry into Kino North Stadium on Tuesday night, which seemed like a bargain because (a) it had been raining and the temperature dropped to a magnificent 68 degrees and (b) the nation’s No. 3 and No. 4 men’s soccer teams were lined up to play.
But no one told me I’d get to spend the next two hours sitting next to Wolfgang Weber, the Father of Tucson Soccer, for which I would’ve paid a separate charge.
It was like a football fan being wired to the headset of Bill Belichick as he gave in-game instructions to Tom Brady.
“Where are you going, son?” he would say when a Pima College attacker lost his way.
“One touch too much,” he said as the Aztecs came THIS CLOSE to beating the seven-time NJCAA champion Yavapai College Roughriders with two minutes left in regulation.
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I know little about the X’s and O’s of soccer but for two hours Tuesday, I was a step ahead of the game.
“Is that good?” I asked Wolfgang.
“That’s bad,” he said, correcting me.
“Was he supposed to go let those Yavapai guys mug him?” I asked.
“He looks like he’s wearing wooden shoes,” he said.
I was drawn to the Pima College vs. Yavapai College men’s soccer match because the Roughriders are the ’27 Yankees of junior college soccer and because the Aztecs have been biting at Yavapai’s heels for the last 15 years.
It ended in a draw, 1-1, after two overtime periods, and the No. 3 Aztecs and the No. 4 Roughriders shook hands with the pledge to meet again Oct. 17 in Prescott, which is pretty much hallowed turf in JC soccer.
If there’s any bitterness in the Pima vs. Yavapai soccer rivalry, any us vs. them rancor, it’s not readily apparent.
The Roughriders were dressed in yellow uniforms purchased six years ago from Wolfgang Weber’s old company, Eiger Sportswear. Maybe YC coach Mike Pantalione, whose career record is an unthinkable 562-48-27, is superstitious. When you’ve won seven national championships and 24 of the last 27 ACCAC championships, you don’t want to change much.
No Nike. No Adidas. But Wolfgang’s old Eiger gear is held dear.
“Mike’s been good to me,” said Pima coach Dave Cosgrove. “He has promoted my program as one of the Top 15 in the polls, and he recommended me for the Hall of Fame in 2013. I’ve got nothing but respect and appreciation for what they’ve done. We model ourselves after them. We’ve been right there with them the last five or six years, and that’s pretty fast company.”
Pima reached the NJCAA finals last year in a postseason known for its irony. Yavapai had pleaded for years to play host to the national tournament, and, at last, 2014 it was scheduled to be played in Prescott.
But in the regionals, previously undefeated Yavapai was shocked and eliminated by Phoenix College. That enabled the Aztecs, who finished 21-5-1, to get to the NJCAA’s biggest soccer event.
Not only that, when 2015 play began in the ACCAC last month, Yavapai’s leading player, Jason Romero, who scored an ACCAC-leading 22 goals last season, had switched teams, transferring to Pima and was immediately eligible.
There’s more. Pima’s only goal Tuesday was scored by Angel Heredia, also a starter for Yavapai’s 20-1-2 team of 2014. He joined Romero in the move from Prescott to Tucson; both of them played high school soccer in San Jose, California.
Romero and Heredia are rare pieces in Cosgrove’s PCC soccer puzzle. The Aztecs’ roster has 21 Southern Arizona players, 13 of who learned the game in Wolfgang Weber’s Tucson Soccer Academy, at which Cosgrove is pretty much large and in charge.
Indeed, Weber ran his finger down PCC’s roster and kept repeating “he played for us; he played for us; he played for us. …” Weber pointed to a pair of Nogales players on Pima’s roster, Robert Gorman, Juan Pablo Segura.
“For a few years, they drove from Nogales to TSA three times a week,” he said.
One No. 3-ranked team. One big soccer family.
Weber coached back-to-back state championships with the Salpointe Catholic boys soccer team in 2012 and 2013. His star goalie, Taylor Anderson, is now Cosgrove’s star goalie at PCC.
After moving to Tucson from Germany in the early 1970s, Weber was the triggerman in what would become a Southern Arizona soccer boom that has flourished for decades.
The Tucson Soccer Academy has grown so much that it now has a yearly budget of almost $1.2 million, with 1,000 developmental Southern Arizona players and about 40 coaches.
The Pima team that tied mighty Yavapai on Tuesday has most of its roots in the TSA. After all these years, one of the tangible gains from the TSA is that Pima College can play Yavapai nose-to-nose, and that the goal of winning a national championship is not fool’s gold.
