“Since many of today’s collegiate players and recruits weren’t alive when App State men’s soccer was dominant, the younger generation isn’t aware of App State’s prominence.”
“‘I think ASU had a goldmine and they wasted it’, former head coach Hank Steinbrecher”
I think these two simple quotes from “App State’s Rich Soccer Tradition… Was the Golden Era Pushed to the Wayside?” embody the strange, sad, and even wasteful decline of such a strong ASU program. Wood’s inclusion of such quotes and opinions of past ASU soccer players and coaches are effective at reviving the history of the sport in the reader’s mind. I had no idea how significant App State’s soccer tradition was, especially for those who were involved in it, but Wood’s presentation of this bountiful yet untold history had me wishing this tradition hadn’t fizzled out.
The assertion that the only reason the younger generations don’t know about App State soccer is because its prime was before their lifetime is an interesting one, as this comparison can’t exactly be made in football here at ASU. Wood expresses this well in his article by emphasizing the significance of events like the App State win over U of M in 2007 and people like the “legendary” football coach Jerry Moore who had been coaching at App since 1989. Events like those ring prominent in the minds of Appalachian students even today, and even though the soccer program had similar successes and prominent players/coaches, keeping the memory of those events and people in soccer alive was just not as lucrative or culturally significant to the student body and institutional identity as time went on. That’s where the significance of this quote lies – not as an explanation for why the tradition fizzled out, but a reminder that had this history of an ASU soccer “Golden Era” been kept alive, it may be a more important part of student and athlete identities as Mountaineers today.
While I understand that the moneymaking sport is going to be the one that tends to be the most defining one in terms of what students and the university as a whole identify with, I also see the value in maintaining a history that once was that sport which students rallied around. Based on this article, I agree with the quote asserting that App State wasted a “goldmine” in terms of letting soccer fall to the wayside, I would argue that it missed the mark a second time by not holding this rich soccer tradition close when cultivating school history and legends. It may be easy to sell football today, but it’s also valuable to the well-roundedness of an institution to uphold the memory of significant parts of the school’s history.
