Football (and family) is life for FPU soccer coach Resendes

Nov. 12—The young coach rarely reflects upon his past considering he's so focused on the present and future. And with a possible national championship in men's college soccer dangling in front of his undefeated Franklin Pierce University Ravens, Ruben Resendes is really dialed in this week. It's tournament time.

The amiable four-year coach, only 31 years old, is passionate about soccer, and his family genes run deep in the sport. His parents emigrated to the U.S. from soccer-mad Portugal when they were in their 20s and settled in Fall River, Mass., a city with a large Portuguese population and an abiding devotion to the game. Ever since he can remember, Resendes dreamed of playing professional soccer, and stardom in Major League Soccer, the top echelon in the U.S. His father played pro soccer in Portugal.

Resendes even has a bit of Dani Rojas in him, the fictional, always-smiling soccer star in the Emmy-winning series "Ted Lasso." Like Rojas (albeit, the flowing hair replaced by a neatly-styled beard), Resendes is ever optimistic, diminutive in height (maybe 5-feet-6) and passionate about the game, a word he uses often. Unlike Rojas, he doesn't walk around campus joyously proclaiming, "Football is life!" but it would fit.

Married with two young children, Resendes grins and says at home he has to reel himself in from watching too much soccer on TV. He subscribes to ESPN+ specifically so he can watch as much soccer as possible, foreign, domestic and college. He'll study everything about a match, right down to how Division I college coaches answer queries from the media. He doesn't care about the outcome of, say, Brighton vs. Newcastle in England's Premier League, but he'll study the intricacies of how it came to be.

"What makes you a better coach is watching other people do it," he says. "I like watching how everyone is doing things at all levels and taking the positives and negatives from it. I'm super, super passionate about that, just watching, watching soccer."

He's already had enormous success at Franklin Pierce, which has a soccer-rich tradition. Its women's teams won four straight national titles in the mid-1990s, and the men earned a national championship in 2007. Resendes arrived in 2019, after the team uncharacteristically went 7-10-1 the year before. He immediately turned things around with a 15-4-2 season, and his four-year record at Franklin Pierce is 61-5-4.

This year the Ravens are 20-0-1 and ranked No. 1 in the country. They begin their title quest in earnest Saturday night as the top seed in the NCAA tournament and will host Notre Dame of Ohio at 6 p.m. at Sodexo Field in Rindge. It's a soccer celebration all weekend, as the women are also hosting the first and second rounds of the NCAA tournament.

As the tournament's No. 1 seed, the men will play all their playoff matches at home in their bid to reach the College Cup (Final Four) in Seattle the first weekend of December. Last year they suffered heartache in the NCAAs, losing in the third round to Millersville on penalty kicks after the match was tied 1-1 through regulation and overtime.

Inside the hectic halls of the FPU Fieldhouse this week, Resendes took some time to mull his own evolving soccer journey. It's not lost on him that had he fulfilled his childhood dream — "thought I'd make millions of dollars in MLS" — his professional playing career would be nearing its end. Instead, his coaching career is on a rapid ascent.

His parents, Ana and Manny, raised him and his older sister in Fall River, where he was captain of the Durfee High School soccer team his junior and senior seasons. Resendes is fluent in Portuguese and holds dual citizenship in Portugal and the U.S. Despite its small size, Portugal has been a longtime world soccer power and qualified for the World Cup that begins later this month in Qatar.

"I grew up watching soccer. A lot of my close friends played; that's all we did," Resendes says. "We played pickup games all the time. Some guys went on to be coaches, some high-level players. Times are changing, but that's kind of what we did. We were passionate about it."

There was no time for other activities beyond academics. "Just soccer and that's it," he says.

His career goals pivoted from playing to coaching when he was an 18-year-old freshman at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. A midfielder, he was recruited by Marc Hubbard, today the University of New Hampshire coach, and was a four-year starter at SNHU, graduating with a degree in sports management in 2012. He won several individual awards, including multiple All-Northeast-10 Conference nods and was the league's Freshman of the Year.

But it was a simple written assignment off the pitch, in a freshman SNHU 101 course, that projected his future: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

"I wrote that if I'm not playing professionally, I see myself as a college coach and running my own soccer academy," Resendes says.

After playing in Iceland for a year following graduation, Resendes joined Hubbard as an assistant coach at SNHU in 2014. His professor/adviser who assigned him that freshman essay sent him a congratulatory message. "I couldn't believe it. She sent me the paper I wrote as a freshman after I got the job at SNHU. She still had it," he says. "I had forgotten that I had written that."

As for the second part of that paper, Resendes does indeed run a soccer academy. He is director of the Resendes Soccer Academy, which conducts more than 50 camps and clinics per year throughout southeastern Massachusetts.

Resendes' own coaching journey has already featured several stops, including top assistant at the University of Vermont for two years, head coach at Division III Dean College in Franklin, Mass. (33-3-0 in two years), director of coaching and youth development for Black Watch Burlington Premier Soccer Club in Vermont and four years as an academy coach and scout in the New England Revolution system.

All that soccer can certainly be tumultuous on family life. Resendes married his high-school sweetheart, Kate McDonald, in 2018. If McDonald's name sounds even vaguely familiar, it's because she was a standout basketball player at Franklin Pierce, a four-year starter at point guard who made the Commissioner's Academic Honor Roll all four years. That they both ended up at Franklin Pierce is pure coincidence; they met at Durfee and did not overlap in Rindge.

She graduated in 2015 and got a job as a gym teacher, returning home to Fall River while Resendes was on his assistant coaching odyssey. They bought a house in Swansea, Mass., right before the Vermont job opened up. He had already bought an engagement ring yet a separation loomed.

"I proposed the same month I was moving to Vermont," he says. "And she said, 'You go, I'm not going.' "

Thus, they agreed to live apart while Resendes gained valuable Division I experience under Vermont Coach Rob Dow. But when they learned Kate was pregnant in 2019, Resendes made his way back to Fall River. "I knew I had to get back home," Resendes says. He was ready to forego his college coaching career and applied for a job as a gym teacher at Greene School in Fall River.

"And I see that the job opens at FPU," he says. A day before his teaching interview in Fall River, FPU called. And he got the job.

Resendes still lives in Swansea, and makes the 1-hour, 45-minute commute to Rindge. He sleeps in his office many nights, especially during the season, but his assistants are trusted former teammates or childhood friends living in the Fall River area so carpooling makes it easier. It's the best coaching staff in the country, he says.

"I wanted the job because I knew how I could improve the program and I knew I could bring it back to the national stage," Resendes says.

Resendes has built Franklin Pierce into a soccer juggernaut once again, seemingly overnight. This year's team rammed through the Northeast-10, winning the regular season and postseason tournament titles. It has outscored opponents 76-4. Resendes was recently named the NE10 Coach of the Year. Along the way, the Ravens defeated his alma mater twice, 1-0 in mid-October and then 7-1 in the NE10 semifinals Nov. 2.

"I tried not to make it personal. It's hard to explain because I love the school," he says of coaching against SNHU.

Resendes recruits heavily in Spain and Portugal because players there embody the style he employs. The players, in turn, relish the opportunity to get an education in the U.S. They are highly technical and precise on the pitch, patiently building from the back with a short passing game, keeping the ball on the ground, probing opponents for weaknesses, then often finishing with an electrifying run.

"I know how to connect with their families because I'm one of them," he says. "We play a more possession-oriented, technical brand. They are able to do what I'm looking for."

As for his own future, no doubt some larger college soccer programs will soon come calling. It's inevitable, the result of Franklin Pierce's longstanding excellence in soccer. Mark Krikorian, the original architect of the five women's national championship teams in the 1990s, last spring finished up a 17-year run at Florida State, where he won three national titles and went to the College Cup a remarkable 11 times. Marco Koolman, coach of the 2007 men's title team, is in the middle of a long run at Holy Cross. And those are just two of many.

Resendes says there's a good reason for that.

"This is one of the best college coaching positions in New England, regardless of division," he says. "Everyone knows about Franklin Pierce."

Dani Rojas couldn't have said it better.