Dom Amore: Southern soccer lands one of its own in Kevin Anderson, Quinnipiac hockey, college basketball coaching carousel, all in the Sunday Read
Kevin Anderson remembers soccer at Southern Connecticut State when it meant players pulling their cars up to an off-campus field and putting the lights on so practice could be completed as darkness fell. His older brother played then.
Those were Bob Dikranian’s teams, and as the program’s founder he built a Division II national championship program during the 1980s. Anderson, a Long Islander, later transferred from George Mason to play for Southern’s 1992 national champs under Ray Reid.
Soccer at SCSU means a lot to those who helped build it, a pride that rises above any division label. Anderson, 51, left Division I Columbia after 14 years as head coach to replace retiring Tom Lang and take over the program at his alma mater. He was hired this week to be Southern’s fourth head coach.
“For me it wasn’t about the division,” Anderson said. “It was about where we were as a school, where and what our Athletic Director Chris Barker was looking to accomplish and joining his team to help that vision come to fruition.”
Anderson was an All-American at Southern, then played pro soccer. He returned as an assistant and helped Lang win two championships in the late 1990s. When Southern needed a new coach, they reached out and got their man, and a fortunate get it is.
“I was looking at something I care deeply about, obviously,” Anderson said. “There’s a draw to it, any time you have a chance to talk, be wanted by your alma mater, that’s an extremely flattering opportunity.”
In the New Haven area, Southern has always been surrounded by pockets of soccer enthusiasts from various countries, fertile territory for Dikranian to start the program in 1966. The SCSU student body, largely commuter students (I was among them), would come together in a big way behind the Owls during their championship years.
“The most exciting moments here were the games we played in the regional final here at Southern to go to the Final Four,” Anderson said. “For me, those games meant the most. Not to belittle national championship games, but those games were the most exciting, the most passionate, thrilling.
“Those games were so meaningful to our campus, our friends, those who lived on campus or off campus and those games expanded themselves in into the greater New Haven community.”
Southern is coming off a 9-5-3 season. Anderson inherits a roster of about 28 players, and will begin the work of building his own squad and putting his stamp on the program. He and his wife, Sara, and daughters Lennon and Harper Grace, live close enough for him to commute to his new job each day.
“I’ll be trying to create a student-athlete experience like the one that was created for me,” Anderson said. “Playing here was a privilege, playing here was a responsibility that we all took on. We looked at the generations before us and we knew we had a foundation and a support system in place to be our very best. It’s wonderful to talk about history, but the responsibility is to create it.”
Stonewalling Bobcats
The Quinnipiac men’s hockey team, ranked as high as No. 1 in the country during the season, may have had a couple of hiccups late in the year, losing in the ECAC semifinal to Colgate in OT for instance, but the Bobcats were on point as the No.1 seed in the NCAA’s Bridgeport Regional, shutting out Merrimack 5-0 on Friday.
Coach Rand Pecknold’s team really grinds and plays stellar defense. Goalie Yaniv Perets got his 10th shutout of the season, 21st of his career, but his teammates limited Merrimack to 15 shots. Quinnipiac (31-4-3) plays Ohio State Sunday at 4 p.m. at Total Mortgage Arena for a berth in the Frozen Four.
The voice for all seasons
Hartford Athletic named Joe D’Ambrosio, who needs no introduction here, to team with Mark Donaldson to call home matches for MyTV9 this season. They debuted Saturday.
Joe D says he’s going back to his “roots” doing soccer play-by-play. Yes, he did high school soccer games in 1979 for WLIS-AM in Old Saybrook. So he has, at one time or another, done play-by-play for men’s and women’s basketball, football, baseball, hockey and soccer at UConn and elsewhere. Did I miss any?
Yes, I did. He’s also done some college lacrosse, high school field hockey and softball.
Sunday short takes
* Dan Hurley often touts the potential head coaches on his staff, like Kimani Young and Luke Murray, and of course Tom Moore has head coaching experience at Quinnipiac. With well over a dozen openings out there, he could lose somebody.
* Also, as the carousel turns, look for former UHart coach John Gallagher to land on his feet in a new “neighborhood.”
* UConn baseball slugger Dominic Freeberger, who got a walk-off hit against Rutgers on Friday and is hitting .370, has one of the coolest names on the planet. His last name is pretty cool, too. Brainstorm: When he homers, the concession stands at Elliot Ballpark should give out, wait for it, free burgers. Why not? It’s not my money.
*A rarity, two ranked baseball teams from New England, UConn and Boston College, meet in Storrs Tuesday.
* Before the NCAA Tournament started in Albany, Rick Pitino was asked for his potential surprise team and, after an obligatory reference to Iona, he said, “Miami.”
* Let’s hope this idea of four regionals in two cities in women’s basketball is one and done. Give four sites a chance to host. As for any talk of a Women’s Final Four for Madison Square Garden, well, yes, please.
Last word
About Ed Cooley’s messy departure from Providence. … He has a right to change jobs, whatever his reasons. But it’s fair to say the Big East is not thrilled to have one school poaching another’s coach, though there is no league rule against it or any other instrument that could have been used to stop it. In this easy transfer era, it raises the scary possibility that the entire core of a team could up and move with the coach to another school in the conference. And, of course, when it became known that Cooley had put his house up for sale in early March, it was hard to avoid the perception he checked out on the Friars, who faded late in the season. The whole thing just could and should have been handled better.
