Dodge ball in place at Vanguard
A continuous tattoo design from left shoulder to wrist is more visible, but it doesn’t take long for anyone observing Randy Dodge coaching his Vanguard men’s and women’s soccer teams to realize that emotions are equally plentiful on his sleeve.
Dodge’s sideline manner is part sarcasm, part humor, part frustration, and mostly intensity. Even the strongest of castigations he delivers to his players seem to be infused with a genuine appreciation for making them better, while somehow increasing their loyalty to their coach, and the team.
Dodge is Vanguard through and through, having played four seasons of soccer and graduated in 1993. The school’s director of soccer, this is his 15th season as the men’s coach and his 11th as the women’s coach.
He has spent more than two decades coaching boys’ and girls’ programs at Aliso Niguel High and has coached in high school for 27 years. He also spent 23 years coaching club soccer, the last 20 for the Southern California Blues, who he guided to three national age-group championships, including the U19 crown in July.
A former UC Irvine men’s assistant coach in the late 1990s, Dodge has also worked with the Olympic Development Program and has been on the coaching staffs of U.S. national U14 and U15 premier teams.
He believes coaching two high school teams, two college teams and a club team makes him unique.
“There is not anybody in the country who does what I do,” he said. “I don’t mean that to come across as I’m better than anyone else, but the Lord has opened doors for me. I’ve worked with good people and I have a wife [Stephanie] who supports me in everything I do.”
It’s the many coaching hats he wears (flat-billed his preference on the sideline) that keep him centered and at times dilute the agonizing thought he devotes to one particular team.
To this point, his Vanguard men opened the season 5-0 and rose to No. 8 in the NAIA rankings. But the Lions, this week ranked No. 9, have lost two of their last three, including a 3-1 setback to visiting Westmont on Wednesday that equaled the amount of goals his team had allowed in its previous seven matches.
The No. 10-ranked VU women opened the season 0-2, but have reeled off eight straight wins, all shutouts, including a 3-0 start in Golden State Athletic Conference play that included a 1-0 overtime upset of No. 3-ranked Westmont on Tuesday.
“There are times when you go from a high [the women’s upset of Westmont] to a low [Wednesday’s men’s loss] in a 24-hour period,” Dodge said. “And last year, we lost back-to-back [men’s and women’s] games to The Master’s that cost both teams a GSAC championship. So, its days like that that you dread the most.”
There are times when logistics force Dodge to choose which Vanguard team he will coach in a match, particularly if both make the postseason, which has become the norm.
As a high school, college and club head coach, he is approaching an estimated 2,000 victories. And he is only 45, with no end in sight.
But he has learned, he said, to be less tormented by the losses.
“It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I finally realized I kind of sucked the air out of the room after a loss,” said Dodge, who has four children, the oldest of which, Chase, is a sophomore at Vanguard.
“And I came to realize that the kids are going to remember the experience, and they won’t remember the wins and losses. It’s really important to make that come across.”
Dodge said he enrolled at Vanguard as a student-athlete intent on becoming a youth minister. He said coaching has allowed him to follow that path on the pitch.
“I’m 100 times better now [working with players] than I was,” Dodge said. “I would hope that I’m a pretty open book and I have my own struggles and stuff that I deal with all the time, but I’m hoping kids see Christ in me. And I still love what I do.”
UCI water polo looking ahead
The UC Irvine men’s water polo team is 7-5 and ranked No. 13 in the NCAA. It’s an uncharacteristic dip below the top 10 for Coach Marc Hunt’s program, which has even more atypical losses to Pomona-Pitzer (8-7 in overtime on Saturday) and Cal Lutheran (9-8 at home on Sept. 21).
But Hunt with a potential automatic qualifying berth to the 2017 NCAA championship for the winner of the newly formed Gold Coast Conference, Hunt elected to redshirt seven players this seaon, including All-Americans Lovre Milos, Kyle Trush, a Corona del Mar High product, and Air Force transfer Robby Stiefel.
UCI Olympian streak snapped
For the first time in eight Olympics, there was not a UCI product playing for the U.S. men’s national team. After the U.S. did not qualify in 1976 and boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, at least one Anteater had been on the roster in 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012.
But Hunt said that had more to do with the philosophy of USA Coach Dejan Udovicic to go with youth, than the pool of older former UCI players in the USA Water Polo program heading into the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in which the inexperienced Americans finished 10th in the 12-team field.
“We are a program that traditionally develops kids for five years,” Hunt said. “For an Irvine kid to get back on the national team [under the current regime], I would have to recruit that kid with him already having been selected to the national team [as a high school player].”
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Barry Faulkner covers colleges.
Twitter: @BarryFaulkner5
