CS Fullerton Coach Just Lives to Sell the Mystery of Soccer to the Masses
The night belonged to Al Mistri, coach of the underfunded, underfed and underappreciated Cal State Fullerton soccer team that jumps up every so often and chomps the nation’s No. 1 team--Indiana, on this occasion--right on the shin bone.
This was Mistri’s not-ready-for-ESPN moment, but his moment nonetheless. It isn’t often Fullerton beats the No. 1 team in the country in anything, so Mistri should have been pumping fists, slapping five, bouncing off walls, howling at the moon.
Instead, he firmly shook the hand of the first sportswriter he saw and asked him, very earnestly, “So tell me, honestly, what did you think? Did you like it? Honestly now?”
Three-to-two overtime victory . . . winner scored on a penalty kick in the 103rd minute with the fog rolling in . . . Fullerton plays short-handed for half an hour, overcoming two red cards, including one to goalkeeper Mike Kornock . . . Kornock is knocked silly on an outside-the-box collision that gets him thrown out of the game . . . backup goalie Justin Johnston comes off the bench to play his first minutes of the season and ride to the rescue . . . Martin Palos, a half-liter-sized freshman midfielder, spends a good portion of the night dribbling madly around and in between 10 Indiana redwoods . . . Johnston leaps high and to his right to punch away the potential game-tying goal in the 120th and final minute.
What’s not to like?
“Really?” Mistri says, rocking back on his heels, initially unsure of what to make of such a response.
Finally, Mistri grins.
A happy customer.
One more.
Mistri collects them like rare butterflies, relishing every find, taking care to note the date and location of each sighting.
For 14 years at Fullerton, Mistri has been trolling this way--rolling his life’s passion out there on abandoned football practice fields every autumn and seeing what the American people think.
If they stay the full 90 minutes, and refrain from test-landing paper airplanes on the midfield circle, Mistri calls it a good day.
“We had 1,437 out here the other day to watch soccer,” Mistri says, sounding as if he would like to toast the achievement.
“That may not sound like much, but for us, that’s great.”
Back in Mistri’s native Italy, AC Milan draws a bigger audience for preleague photo shoots. Mistri couldn’t care less. He accepted his assignment long ago--to help colonize soccer’s last frontier, the gridiron-crazed States--and has been on the clock long enough to remember days when four-figure crowds seemed like pie in the sky.
“I’ve been blessed,” he says, “to have seen everything here from just about the beginning.
“I remember in 1964 juggling a basketball (with the feet) on the way to an Angel game. I was an exchange student, and I was juggling and punching the ball like most European kids would. My friends were looking at me like I was a weirdo.
“That was followed by 1967, when I had to go to Tijuana to buy soccer shoes because there was no one selling soccer shoes in the L.A. area.
“And, of course, in ‘71, I saw the beginnings of what is high school soccer today. During the same time, the under-19 level and the club scene took off. I played college ball from ’67 to ‘70, at Cal Poly Pomona, and there were so few soccer teams that all of us were mixed together. Our schedule included both UCLA and Biola.
“In 1981, I came here to Fullerton and people didn’t even know where the uniforms were. That’s a fact. To see it develop to where it is now, with college soccer having taken root and our program rumored to be fully funded for the first time, is a pretty significant thing.”
Mistri unabashedly predicts that soccer will “make it” as mainstream American sport.
“It will happen,” he says.
“I won’t be around to see it, but it will happen.”
For argumentative support, Mistri cites two recent trends--the growth of women’s soccer and the financial constraints now tightening on college football.
“Women are the best allies soccer has,” Mistri says. “The ones who are playing now are going to pass it down to their children and, I guarantee you, their children are going to learn the game.
“The woman’s influence in the family is significantly higher than what a man has, regardless. And the woman is not going to be gender-partial. She is going to push soccer to her sons and her daughters.”
Mistri also believes that within 10 years, “only 60 to 70 schools will be playing Division I football.” Other programs will be forced into economic extinction by the big-time powers, according to Mistri, “and when that happens, although begrudgingly, athletic administrators will turn to soccer.
“Here is a sport that with 2,000 people in the stands can more than adequately pay for itself, and provide some pretty significant entertainment.”
The soccer-for-football exchange isn’t likely to gather much support in these parts, a notion that draws a quick nod and clarification from Mistri.
“This is not a way to supplant football,” he says. “That is not the issue here. The issue is to have a number of significant institutions, like the University of Vermont, Santa Clara, Portland and Cal State Fullerton, saying, ‘OK, in the fall, we play soccer.’
“And that will provide the sport exactly what it needs, acceptance into mainstream of arrival.”
Date of arrival?
Some time around 2024, give or take a half-decade.
“From 1964 to now is 30 years,” Mistri says. “In that time we’ve gone from practically no existence to where we are right now. And right now, in the macrocosm of American sports, soccer is nothing.”
But if Fullerton can beat Indiana on a wet field down a man, hey, anything just might be plausible.
“I’m not going to hold my breath,” says Mistri, Wilderness Pioneer, “and I’m not suggesting anyone does. But anyone who thinks this thing is dead is grossly mistaken. By a long, long shot.”
