Anders Carlsson remembers it well. Carlsson, who has been a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis for many years, played on one of the first high school soccer teams in Marin at Redwood High.
“I was on some of those early teams, and we had a good time,” Carlsson said. “But when I played in the late 1960s, Novato was the real power in the league.”
Times have certainly changed, considering the popularity of soccer in Marin and around California, but maybe not that much. Just like 40 years ago, Novato High is on top in the North Bay, having just completed a successful run to the section title.
Carlsson, who moved to the U.S. from Sweden with his family as a young boy, played on a Redwood team that also featured a midfielder named Robin Williams (yes, that Robin Williams), as well as an exchange student from Africa named Frances Kilonzo and three seniors who were among the first all-league selections from Redwood. Team captain Todd Sloan, Dave Airola and Carter Ingram were all standouts in Redwood soccer in the late ’60s when the sport was just getting its footing in the MCAL.
Because Redwood could draw talent from the twin cities of Larkspur and Corte Madera, as well the Tiburon/Belvedere communities and the Ross/Kentfield area, the school became a major dynasty in Marin high school soccer in the late 1970s. Jim Campbell, who hailed from Scotland, was hired by then athletic director Phil Roark to take over the program in 1978 and, over the next 15 seasons, his boys and girls teams combined to win 19 league titles and three North Coast Section championships. The girls team had a particularly conspicuous run of 96 straight wins that were compiled over the course of several seasons.
“We had a great feeder program in the Twin Cities with youth soccer,” Campbell said. “We put together traveling teams that went around the area and played clubs from the Sonoma, Santa Rosa and Walnut Creek areas.”
Campbell, a former pro in Europe, stayed busy with the sport after arriving in America, as he played in a highly competitive adult league in Marin that featured players from such far-flung locales as Brazil, England and Argentina. Along with Corte Madera resident and standout USF soccer coach Steve Negoesco, the two men were important contributors in building up soccer interest in among Marin kids in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Negoesco was especially instrumental in helping to supervise the development of the Stompers, a club for boys 16-under out of the Terra Linda area. The Stompers became quite a local sensation, as they were one of the most successful traveling teams in the western region. Fran Rowley, who worked closely with the Stompers, was a standout coach in local youth soccer, and his son Andrew not only played on the Stompers but also later starred at USF under Negoesco.
Two other men who helped coach and develop youth and officiating programs were Milt Woods, who worked with kids from the San Rafael and Terra Linda areas and went on to officiate international-level games, and Dave Fromer, who also coached the boys JV and girls varsity soccer teams at Tam High in Mill Valley.
Making inroads
While soccer never basked in the glamour that was enjoyed by the more traditional sports of baseball, football and basketball, the game made some major inroads in Marin in the late 1960s and the decade that followed. Attention was drawn to the sport partly because of the terrific success Negoesco’s USF teams enjoyed. The Dons won four NCAA titles in the 1960s and ’70s. During that same period, the nascent North American Soccer League came into being and the it captured national attention by luring some of the world’s great players, including Brazilian star Pele, Georgio Chinaglia of Italy and Franz Beckenbauer of Germany.
Meanwhile, Marin produced some eye-opening talent of its own.
“The best athlete I may have seen was Melissa King from Terra Linda,” said Milt Woods. “She was easily the best soccer player in the county in the late 1980s, and she was later a star for the women’s basketball team at Santa Clara.”
Another Terra Linda star that came from the boys team, who Woods remembers was Marquis White.
“He almost single-handedly won several games for the Trojans,” said Woods.
White later went on to star at USF and then played with Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids.
Woods was a popular figure in Terra Linda youth sports, as he worked with not only boys and girls soccer, but softball as well. A former minor league baseball player, Woods attributed much of his success to his easygoing manner and being “a master of the one-liners.”
A natural born talker who became a very successful salesman, Woods knew how to cajole talent out of the young athletes by teaching them the basics of the sport while also making it fun.
Campbell’s techniques might have been a little more traditional and stern, but the results speak for themselves.
Campbell was blessed to be able to tutor a number of top players at Redwood, but he says his best athlete might have been a young man named Todd Brockman, who still lives nearby in Ross and is now a successful businessman. Brockman starred on a 1987 Redwood team that Campbell still considers one of his best.
“He was not only a wonderful young man but also just a great athlete,” Campbell said proudly. “He was not only one of the best soccer players at Redwood, but at the time he was also one of the top high school track and field stars in the bay area,” Campbell claims.
Remembering Redwood
Other players who had major roles on that particular title winning Redwood team included winger Chris Chavez, sweeper Ralph Venne and winger John Davis. Redwood not only breezed to the MCAL title that year, but they were the first Marin boys’ team to win the Bay Area Tournament of Champions trophy, turning the trick in 1972.
Another standout player from Redwood who went onto have a very successful pro career in soccer was midfielder Pete Woodring. Woodring, who graduated in the mid 1980s was a standout at Cal, and then went to Germany and played with a team from Hamburg in the Bundesliga, Germany’s first division in 1992.
“I don’t think there’s a kid in Marin who has worked as hard as he has to achieve what he has achieved,” Campbell said at the time.
Woodring and future World Cup and pro star Eric Wynalda were the only Americans playing in Germany’s first division at the time.
Although the teams at Tam High couldn’t compete with the likes of Redwood or Terra Linda, Fromer says the Mill Valley youth soccer club teams helped develop some top notch talent that later played on the high school level throughout the county.
“We drew mostly from the Mill Valley area, but we also attracted some of the best athletes. I remember a kid named Kolya Hardy who took part in our youth program, and he was an amazing athlete. I think if he stuck with soccer he would have been fantastic,” Fromer said. Years later, Hardy ended up becoming an all-league football player at Tam.
On the club front
Like Campbell and Woods, Fromer had a noteworthy career as a player, and his favorite memory is from the early 1960s when he played on a team of young men 19-under from San Francisco. His overlooked and underdog team pulled off a big upset to win a national title in a tournament final at Philadelphia, a memory that Fromer cherishes to this day.
“I love the game, because so much goes into the effort,” Fromer said. “I love the qualities of imagination, teamwork, and power. They combine to bring a certain dignity to the game.”
These days, there are plenty of exciting local players as well as some terrific coaches such as Branson’s Tom Ryan, a fine player in his own right who played on the U.S. Amateur Cup championship team. Ryan has enjoyed a strong tenure with his boys and girls teams at Branson.
Perhaps is most significant to the coaches, players and fans of the sport of soccer is that it’s fun for everyone.
“To me, soccer is life in miniature,” Campbell said. “I tried to bring my kids along by just teaching the game, it wasn’t that complicated. They soon learned.”
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Bruce Macgowan
Bruce Macgowan, a Marin native living in Fairfax, is a broadcast journalist covering professional and college sports in the Bay Area for 25 years. Macgowan’s Marin history column appears monthly. Contact him by e-mail at brucemacgowan@comcast.net
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