Post by jimsteel on Jun 27, 2023 11:10:39 GMT -5
Hubert Vogelsinger a former coach in the NASL passed away at the age of 85
While he coached in college and the professional ranks, Vogelsinger forged a greater reputation as one of the first operators of a soccer camp, the Vogelsinger Soccer Academy in 1965. The camp was a destination for many up-and-coming players for several decades.
Vogelsinger was no-nonsense a coach and as a camp counselor and director.
“He was a very strong disciplinarian,” said former NASL defender Charlie Mitchell, who was Vogelsinger’s captain with Team Hawaii and successor as head coach. “He was he was very, very, very tough on the players. But he was fair. He didn’t want excuses. He managed with a strong hand. Some players can handle it, and some players had a hard time with it. But he was honest, and he was fair.”
Vogelsinger’s influence on soccer camps was immense.
In 2018, Jan O’Connor, the executive vice president of Nike US Sports Camps, praised Vogelsinger for the work he had done with camps.
“Hubert’s longtime dedication and commitment to young soccer players is most admirable,” O’Connor said on the US Soccer Camps website. “What is so special about Hubert is that he instills skills in youth that extend far beyond the soccer field. Commitment, perseverance, and hard work, all skills that can make an athlete a better soccer player, a better student, a better employee, and a better person.”
Vogelsinger coached Brandeis University and Yale University before entering the professional ranks with the Boston Minutemen in 1974. He guided Boston for three seasons, including a rocky 1976 campaign in which the then financially ailing club was forced to sell its players to stay afloat.
The Austrian native traveled several thousands of miles to the west to direct Team Hawaii. He was fired midway through the season, but was named the first head coach of the original San Diego Sockers in 1978. He led the team through the 1978 NASL season.
Here is a sample of what was said about Vogelsinger on Facebook:
* “It’s with an extremely heavy heart today to share the passing of one of the greatest soccer innovators the International Soccer Fraternity has ever known. Hubert Vogelsinger passed away today, June 22, 2023 . RIP MY FRIEND AND MENTOR,” Matt Kennedy said.
* “What a terrible, sad loss…RIP Huber… always remembered,” United Soccer League creator Francisco Marcos said.
* “American Soccer Coaching Pioneer and Legend Rest In Peace Played for Hubert in The NASL SAN Diego Soccer.” former U.S. men’s international defender David D’Errico said.
* “Hubert tried to recruit me to go to Yale. Coached our team that went to the Cowel International Soccer Tour in Scotland when I was 15. Great coach,” former New York Cosmos David Brcic said.
* “Hubert tried to recruit me to go to Yale in 1973 and stayed with him and his attic filled with Puma!,” former Dallas Tornado defender Neil Cohen said. “Also went on bus with him from Guadalajara to Leon for Germany vs England in 1970 World Cup Ran fantastic camps and improved so many kids played against his team Hawaii team and Sockers RIP coach for a job well done!”
* “One of the best soccer, clinicians and promoters of the game in our country😞💔 RIP,” former NASL player Tommy Mulroy said.
Vogelsinger ventured to the United States in 1961. At the time, he was earning a degree in physical education in Vienna. As it turned out he fell in love with Lois Ryan, an American Fulbright scholar who was in Austria. Vogelsinger accompanied her to Massachusetts. According to a 2003 Soccer America story, Ryan told Vogelsinger, “You don’t need to pack your boots or a ball, because I’ve never seen any soccer in the United States.”
Of course, that did not deter Vogelsinger.
“I snuck my boots in my suitcase and I was playing with the Italians my first Saturday in America,” he was quoted by Soccer America.
Some four weeks after entering the country, he married Ryan. Vogelsinger got an assistant coach’s job at Middlesex School. He went onto coach at Brandeis University for several years before being named Yale University head coach in 1966.
Vogelsinger became popular as a guest clinician or coach at schools.
“The local private schools kept inviting me to help, mainly with shooting,” he was quoted by Soccer America. “There wasn’t enough time to go to all of them, so I suggested all the players come to one place. We had our first camp, with 60 players.”
Vogelsinger got so many requests for coaching sessions that he created the Vogelsinger Soccer Academy at a time when soccer camps were as foreign as the game of soccer was to the American public.
Vogelsinger told Soccer America that his camps offered “intense, technical development training.”
Needless to say, those camps were for serious players because Vogelsinger could be a taskmaster.
“They’re either in heaven or hell, depending on whether a kid is ready to pay for his passion,” Vogelsinger was quoted by SA. “In the old days, we’d lose five or six kids a week. Now we hardly lose any, because they know what to expect and end up loving it.”
The soccer camps were not for the feint of mind or body.
“It was boot camp with a soccer ball — designed and micromanaged by a perfectionist Austrian orphan and former professional soccer player who sported a military-style haircut, and whose impossibly large thighs bulged and rippled when he drilled soccer balls into the back of the net,” John G. Taft, CEO of RBC Wealth Management, wrote in the Huffington Post in 2016.
“Each day began with a three-mile run at dawn, kicking a ball across dew-soaked fields that numbed your bare and blistered feet. Morning and afternoon training sessions were held in sweltering summer heat. Competitive games took place after dinner. Then, a lecture and soccer movies before exhaustion hit and we crawled into our sleeping bags, muscles aching.”
When Vogelsinger was at Yale University, Dr. Joe Machnik coached soccer at the University of New Haven. He held camps at the Taft School, where Vogelsinger allowed Machnik to run the first No. 1 Goalkeeper’s Camp, which is still around today.
Machnik said he and Vogelsinger finished their playing careers at New Haven City in the Connecticut State League on a team made up of mostly coaches. The team included several well-known players from New England and the Nutmeg State – Ben Brewster, Chico Chicurrian, Don Wynschenk and Jim Kulmann, Machnik said.
Vogelsinger knew talent. In 1976, Mitchell, a perennial NASL all-star left back, was not pleased with the playing time he received with the New York Cosmos. He then asked Cosmos head coach Gordon Bradley that he would like to be traded.
“The next day he told me that Hubert had contacted them and [would] take me to Hawaii with a new franchise,” Mitchell said. “I always appreciated it; Hubert with a quick response.
“I never ever had any conversation with him. I just played against his teams all the time. I could feel he appreciated me as an opponent and remembered me.”
It was with Team Hawaii in 1977 that Vogelsinger was involved with one of the most surreal games in American pro soccer history when his team met the Rochester Lancers.
It was called the first “coachless” game in NASL history.
Lancers head coach Don {Dragan) Popovic and Vogelsinger each were handed two-game suspensions and fined $500 apiece for incidents and remarks against referees. Both coaches were not allowed to sit on the bench, but they still could talk to their respective teams in the dressing room prior to the match and at halftime.
Popovic relayed instructions to the field through injured midfielder Francisco Escos, who was injured. Rochester trainer Joe Sirianni also was suspended and fined $200 for pinching referee Bob Matthewson after a loss at the Chicago Sting. Vogelsinger also had a confrontation in Chicago, with referee Peter Johnson, six days earlier in a 1-0 shootout loss to the Sting, leading to his ban.
At the time, commissioner Phil Woosnam said the sanctions “were the stiffest penalties we have imposed on coaches,” since he became commissioner in 1969. “The reason the penalties are so high are not only because of what happened on the field, but also because both coaches went public to the press with their criticisms of the referees involved,” Woosnam told the Rochester Times-Union. “We simply can’t have that. You can’t resolve any problems between coaches and referees by backstabbing in the press, because it’s strictly a one-way street. The referees don’t have any way to defend themselves publicly. The league prohibits them from talking to the press about such incidents.”
Vogelsinger was forced to sit in the stands behind one of the goals, occasionally sending directions through C.J. Carenza.
“Actually, I can see the game better from the stands. I might just stay there,” he was quoted by the Honolulu Advertiser. “Being on the bench is just to be close to the to lend them support, but if the team feels it’s okay, I’ll stay in the stands.”
When Team Hawaii player Brian Tinnion was asked about playing with a coach on the bench, he replied, “It’s ….-ing great!”
Team Hawaii won the game and evened its record at 7-7. Vogelsinger was “relieved of his duties” two weeks later, only two hours before Team Hawaii lost at the Tampa Bay Rowdies, 4-3, on June 22, 1977. At the time, Vogelsinger was dealing with an undisclosed ailment.
Vogelsinger was also an author. He wrote five books:
How to Star in Soccer (1968), Winning soccer skills and techniques (1970),The Challenge of Soccer: A Handbook of Skills, Techniques, and Strategy (1973), New Challenge of Soccer (1980) and Power Basics of Soccer (1983).