Sunday, September 11, 2011

Evansville embraces soccer, entices this soccer family | MIKE JACOBS COLUMN

From the Evansville Courier Press, September 11, 2011


Why Evansville?

That was the question I was asked by some friends at a Purple Aces Club gathering, and I think my answer pleasantly surprised those I was sitting with.

Having been born and raised in the New York metropolitan area and despite growing up with a sports orientation through professional sports teams like the Cosmos, Yankees and Knickerbockers, I was always a college soccer fan. The University of Connecticut dominated college soccer in the early 1980s, and with programs like Brooklyn College and Long Island University being nationally ranked, it was easy to find a college soccer fix around the North American Soccer League offseason.

Long before my arrival in the Midwest, through magazines like Soccer America and Soccer Digest, my naive geography told me the first two things I knew about Evansville — the basketball team wore sleeves on their jerseys, and Fred Schmalz's Purple Aces could play with ANYBODY in the nation.

Names like Mick Lyon and Dan McHugh were fairly familiar, even halfway across the country, and when I was offered the opportunity to leave my position as the head coach at Iona College to join coach Schmalz's staff, I didn't need to be asked twice.

My wife Jen and I only had one child (Katie) when we arrived here in 2000, and it was a bit of an adventure to leave friends and family to pursue my coaching dreams. It was really blind faith to attempt to be a part of one of the nation's truly elite college soccer programs, and what we found was a lot more than that.

After two seasons, I was again offered a unique opportunity — this time in Durham, N.C., as a member of the staff at Duke University. When weighing the options, former Aces basketball coach Jim Crews helped me put it in perspective. Coach Crews asked me if I would like to be the head coach at UE some day, and then told me, "If you stay here, you may be a candidate; if you go to Duke and do well, you will definitely be a candidate."

Sure enough, in the midst of a 2005 season that saw ACC champion Duke ranked No. 1 in the nation, the opportunity arose for our family to return and for me to fill the vacant position of head coach at UE.

The only place our family would have left Duke for was Evansville. UE has always been my dream job and has been so because of the unique relationship that the Aces have with their community, and specifically, with the soccer community.

I have never been in a city where soccer is more important. You can see it at Price Park or Goebel Soccer Complex, watching young Evansville Soccer Club participants chasing balls around the field; you can see it at the EVSC Fields on a Wednesday night rivalry game between two top high school teams; you can see it when Indiana University comes to town to play the hometown Aces in front of capacity crowds.

Soccer is a massive participation sport in our community, but between fan support and media coverage, there is nowhere else where soccer is more important.

In a transient profession like college athletics, it is nice to be at a destination where you can be a part of something bigger than yourself.

Today is a big day at Black Beauty Field at Arad McCutchan Stadium, as we combine two tremendous traditions in Aces Soccer — the final day of the ProRehab Aces Soccer Classic and the Kick It for the Cure breast cancer benefit in which our Aces will wear pink jerseys versus Eastern Illinois. Kickoff is at 2:30 p.m., and your attendance will only amplify why being in Evansville was a pretty easy decision.

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