Ninety Minutes With Peter Gooding

by Michael Jones

October 10, 2002 - There are many words that could be used to describe Peter Gooding, the coach and Athletic Director at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He is a coach, a player and an administrator. He is a gentleman and a scholar, Some people might choose unkind words, since he has made more than a few enemies in thirty years of “getting things done” in soccer. But the vast majority of people who come into contact with the genial Englishman come away with the impression that he is a thoughtful man, one not prone to blowing his own trumpet, even though he has done more than most to put soccer where it is today in this country.

It is perhaps ironic that Gooding should have become such an icon of the college game when it was a headmaster’s insistence that he complete his schooling and attend college that essentially put paid to his own professional playing career. The year was 1956 and Gooding, already an established name on the London schoolboy team, had been invited to sign professional papers at either Arsenal or Chelsea. But there was a catch. Since it would not have been possible to both play professionally and attend school, permission had to be granted by his school headmaster before any player could turn professional.

Gooding was attending the William Ellis Grammar School at the time, a school known for its academic excellence, to say nothing of its preference for rugby over soccer. Whether the fact that Gooding was also a promising rugby player had any impact on the headmaster’s decision may never be known, but the young soccer star was not allowed to sign as a professional, and instead took an academic path that led him in a very different direction.

While many of his peers started to show immediate improvement, and some went on to enjoy illustrious professional careers, Gooding hit the books, graduated from school and attended Loughborough University in northern England to train to be a teacher. In those days you could count on one hand the number of players who had been able to successfully pursue a professional career after graduating from college, so Gooding’s dreams of a professional career were essentially ended by that headmaster’s decision.

Yet it is the system, rather than the headmaster, that Gooding is still critical of some thirty years later. “The problem with the English game,” he says, “is that it becomes self-fulfilling. You can get some absolutely wonderful players who, either through circumstances or maturation, aren’t quite there. But the moment they aren’t signed, or they’ re not in a professional environment, then lesser players go by them simply because of their training. It’s a system that is expensive on young talent, and I don’t think it’s a particularly good one.”

Gooding was able to keep playing at a high amateur standard by playing in college, playing for the esteemed Corinthians amateur club, and in London’s highly competitive Sunday leagues. He remembers the Sunday league games as being some of the best soccer around at the time.

“There were certain Sunday teams in North London that, when we played, we’d get a crowd of 2,000 watching our games” he recalls. “Those were the Halcyon days of soccer really. We generally played at Regent’s Park, and they always played us on field 4, which was the big field right in the middle of the park. You would leave the locker room and you’d walk out through a gauntlet of fans, the field was totally surrounded, very partisan, and it was very good football.”

Other games could be had playing for the reserve sides of either Queens Park Rangers or Reading, two of the less-renowned London clubs of the day, and Gooding soon settled into a career as a teacher, only playing soccer on weekends.

On New Year’s day 1964, he left England for Canada, where he joined Victoria United in the Pacific Coast League. He was shocked at how high the quality of play was on this side of the Atlantic (“probably the level of England’s second division.”) After two years, the need to secure a fourth year of college education brought him to UMass to study for his masters in exercise physiology. He has lived the United States ever since.

His arrival coincided with the revival of professional soccer in the United States in the mid-to-late sixties. First the NPSL, and then the NASL and the ASL were formed at about this time and Gooding played a handful of games for a short-lived team in Hartford, and later signed for the Rhode Island Oceaneers in Providence. Gooding was not a full-time player, since he had taken a teaching post on Cape Cod after finishing his studies, but he was flown out for games. Not wishing to be seen as a carpet-bagger, though, he had insisted that he would only play for the Oceaneers on the condition that his signing did not deprive an American player of a place on the team.

At about this time, Peter Gooding the coach started to emerge as a result of his meeting with UMass coach Larry Briggs. Briggs was one of the leading lights of the US coaching scene at the time, had been one of the founding members of the NSCAA, and became something of a mentor to Gooding. It was Briggs who encouraged Gooding to stay in the United States, and convinced him that he could earn a living coaching at the collegiate level, a concept that was totally alien to Gooding’s English background.

Briggs also took Gooding to his first NSCAA Convention in New York City in 1967, a significant event that would have a long-lasting impact on both Gooding and the coaches association. Gooding would become immersed in the NSCAA, assuming a number of high-profile roles, and even serving as President from 1990-1991. But that would all come later. In 1968, just as his playing career was starting to wind down, Gooding took the job as the soccer coach at Amherst, and began a career as one of the great coaches and administrators of the soccer in the United States.

“Because there were so few really experienced people around, in terms of playing experience, people got to hear about me quite quickly,” he remembers. Gooding soon found himself in demand for camp work outside of his collegiate coaching duties.

He also started the Amherst Youth Soccer Club at about this time, and served for many years as its self-appointed commissioner, fighting an ongoing battle, even then, with overly competitive parents who put too much pressure on the kids to perform.

Gooding soon earned enough of a reputation that he was invited to join the staff of the then nascent USSF coaching schools. He declined, citing philosophical differences with the coaching styles that were being espoused by Detmar Kramer, the former German National Team coach who had been brought over by USSF to set up the coaches licensing program.

“He seemed very German to me, very adamant that you had to have been a high level player to be a good coach. At the time I was so sympathetic to someone like Larry Briggs, who couldn’t possibly have played, ever, but who had already done a lot for the game in the forties and fifties. So I rejected that.

“They had a meeting, I remember, in the Commodore (Hotel) in New York, and it was almost like being anointed by the Pope. So I didn’t go that route, and it led to almost a life-long, very low level of hostility between me and what I’ve been trying to do and a small group of the more prominent federation coaches.”

That hostility only increased when, years later, Gooding was put in charge of setting up the NSCAA’s own coaching academy program in direct competition with that which was offered by the Federation. Gooding relished the opportunity to set up an alternative system that placed less emphasis on playing ability, and treated the candidates with more respect.

“We (the NSCAA Board) were all very dissatisfied with the Federation educational program” he recalls. “It was an outrageous program at that time. It was a group of coaches, principally college guys, on their staff, and the whole attitude was abusive towards candidates, centered around whether they could play or not. The candidates weren’t treated with respect and the whole approach was sort of a boot camp, was disparaging, and didn’t really have sound educational principles”

Gooding made many enemies in the USSF by becoming the lightning rod of criticism, but eventually he was able to use the somewhat chaotic nature of the USSF to build a bridge of reconciliation. He persuaded Jim Lennox, the coach at Hartwick College in Oneonta to write the NSCAA curriculum, even though Lennox was himself considered a mainstay of the USSF program.

“Jimmy Lennox was firmly established on the Federation staff,” Gooding remembers, “and was running their A-Licenses. But they were always having fights with the administrators, or they weren’t working, or they were fired. It was at a time when Lennox was willing to consider another program because, at that particular time, he wasn’t working for the Federation because they’d had a tiff about something.”

Lennox was one of the few Federation senior coaching staff who almost everybody spoke well of, and his involvement with the new renegade coaching program gave it an immediate stamp of approval and respectability. Gooding also invited Lennox to become the first director, which led to the irony of the NSCAA’s own program being mainly staffed by USSF coaches.

“But I was pretty insistent that our ideology would be different,” says Gooding. “There would be no playing requirement, in terms of testing, and testing itself would minimized. Until then, you couldn’t get an A-License if you couldn’t juggle a hundred times with each foot, and so on, which I though was absurd.”

Indeed, one of Gooding’s greatest satisfactions was that the NSCAA coaching course began to attract a number if candidates that would never have gone near a USSSF coaching course because they did not have the playing experience. Women started to attend the NSCAA courses, when very few had ever attended the USSF ones, and youth and high school coaches, who had not felt particularly welcome at Federation courses, started to study the game through the NSCAA programs.

The criticism that some leveled at the NSCAA courses is that they were too candidate friendly, and that they were too willing to award diplomas to undeserving coaches. Gooding accepts the criticism but prefers to dwell on the positive impact of offering coaching courses to people with limited playing experience, who were yet serious and earnest in the desire to improve as coaches.

Few now would argue that the NSCAA coaching academy has been a huge success, but Gooding, while proud of the legacy, recognizes that he also paid a price.

“I will not be modest, I will say that I had a lot to do with it and it required a great deal of fortitude on my part, and I made a lot of enemies that I didn’t realize I was making. But that’s what happens when you try to push something forward.”

And yet the headaches associated with launching the NSCAA’s education progam may have just been preparation for one of Peter Gooding’s later challenges, which was crafting the merger of the USISL and the A-League.

Through a former student and player, who had gone on to become Director of Marketing at Umbro, Gooding had become involved with the soccer equipment giant. Jack Stone, the owner of Umbro had asked Gooding for his input on the USISL, which Umbro was considering sponsoring (Umbro already sponsored the A-League). Gooding was a fan of the USISL but saw confusion in the marketplace vis-à-vis the “other” US minor league. So Stone directed him to find a way to use Umbro’s muscle to bring the two sides together and create an all-encompassing feeder system for player development.

While the A-League was more professionally run, and its teams worked with larger budgets, the USISL had size on its side, comprising more than eighty teams, compared to seven in the A-League. But the biggest problem of all was the personal distrust that existed between the league’s respective commissioners, Richard Groff of the A-League and Francisco Marcos of the USISL.

Again, Gooding used the approach of earning the trust of an insider. This time it was Frank DuRoss, the owner of the Rochester Raging Rhinos, which was the most successful team in the A-League. While loyal to Richard Groff, for having given him his entrance into soccer, Du Ross shared Godding’s vision of a merged league. With DuRoss on his side, Gooding was able to travel the country, build up trust among the various owners, and negotiate a settlement that included the A-League name, but the USISL infrastructure. Marcos stayed on as the Commissioner of the newly merged league and Gooding assumed a temporary role as Managing Director.

So successful had Gooding been in negotiating the minor league merger, that Jack Stone offered him a full-time job with Umbro, which Gooding even considered leaving his job at Amherst for. But the sudden decline in Umbro’s financial fortunes, coupled with an illness in Goodings family caused him to reconsider.

Instead he returned to Amherst and resumed coaching the men’s soccer team.

Gooding had been forced to give up coaching in 1989 by the ever-growing demands of his other work. Over the previous two decades, he had broadened his involvement at Amherst to include coaching the men’s lacrosse team, as well as the women’s squash team, and he had become professor of physical education, chair of the P.E. department and director of athletics. He had also taken on a number of voluntary positions that even included a stint on the Development Committee of the United States Figure Skating Association.

When he returned to coaching, perhaps realizing that his workload was still quite formidable, it was on the condition that he be allowed to bring in his son Milton to act as co-coach. The father and son team steered the Jeffs to the NCAA Division 3 semifinal in 1998.

Gooding now spends most of his time at Amherst but still has a view of the game that is wider than most. Having been involved in all aspects of soccer from professional to college to youth, as a player, a coach and an administrator, he sees lots to be thankful for in the way soccer has progressed.

Success in last summer’s World Cup was particularly gratifying. But he also expresses some caution. “The World Cup was an enormous pat on the back for all of us involved in soccer these past thirty years,” he says, “but it does not translate into the emergence of the sport from minor league to major league. It upsets me to see my own (Amherst) players channel surfing right past an MLS game on television.”

Gooding believes that the most durable model for professional soccer in the US is the A-League model, with multiple owners operating teams on relatively small budgets.

While supportive of the women’s game, Gooding professes to be concerned about the growing resentment about the status of the women’s game vis-a-vis the men’s game. He recognizes that many people who, like him, have put many years of hard work into building the sport are not receiving the credit they deserve from people in the women’s game who have had enjoyed great success in a relatively short period of time. Gooding wonders how much longer that success might have taken to materialize had many people in the men’s game not laid the foundations decades before.

On-field observations include being “very disappointed in the overly physical style of play in the WUSA.” and finding it “incredibly depressing to watch Division 3 men’s soccer in the last four or five years.”

“With the exception of Williams, so many of the better teams seem to get through by kicking the other team off the park” he says.

And yet Gooding is bullish on the future of soccer in the United States.

“Soccer is a game that counts now in America. When I came here thirty-five years ago, I was not sure that would ever happen.”

Some might argue that it is because people like Peter Gooding came here thirty-five years ago that it did happen.