Soccer at Haverford: More than a Game

A turn-of the century soccer game versus Cornell.

Christy Morris sat in the stands at Haverford soccer matches, his slender frame slightly stooped, his face wrinkled, one of many old men who attended every home game, when he was first spotted in the early 1960s by Greg Kannerstein, then a freshman.

But it was not until later that Kannerstein realized who Morris was.

On April 1, 1905, Morris scored the only goal in the first intercollegiate soccer game in the United States, giving Haverford College a 1-0 victory against Harvard.

“I know the guy who scored the first goal and the last goal,” Kannerstein, now Haverford’s athletic director, said last week. “Made me feel old for a minute, but it was a nice feeling.”

The last score Kannerstein referred to was by midfielder Matt Rushton, a junior recently named the Centennial Conference player of the week, in the Fords’ 4-1 loss to Eastern College on Sept. 25. Haverford is 4-4-2 this season. But this year is about milestone victories for Haverford, which plays in Division III and has the nation’s oldest college soccer program.

On Sept. 7, the Fords became the first men’s soccer team to reach 700 victories, defeating Neumann College, 7-0.

Soccer came to an American campus in 1901 when a Haverford student, Richard Gummere, sought an alternative to rugby during the cricket off-season. He had played soccer as a schoolboy in England and suggested the sport to his cricket teammates.

Haverford compiled a 4-2 record in its inaugural season as a club team in a local league around Philadelphia.

The Fords have fielded 58 All-Americans since 1910 and have employed legendary coaches like Jimmy Mills, who led the program from 1949 to 1970, commuting to practice every day from his job as a loom fixer in a Philadelphia carpet mill. In 1956, he took a year off to coach the Olympic team, two years after being inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

“When we play, we don’t just play for ourselves,” said Joe Amorim, in his 20th season as coach at Haverford. “We play for everyone who’s gone before us.”

After the loss to Eastern College, Amorim urged his team not to be intimidated by its past. “Don’t look at that tradition as a heavy weight, as a burden, but instead as something that gives an impulse to be better,” he said.

But it is hard not to be awed when parents of former players continue to crowd the stands, long after their sons have graduated. In 1988, after Haverford defeated Elizabethtown College, 2-1, to win the conference championship for the first time since 1953, Amorim remembers a father running from the stands, screaming, “This is for Yuker!'” and leaping on top of the celebrating mass of players and coaches. His son, Nelson Antoniuk, had graduated the year before.

Earlier this year, the alumni returned for their annual game against the varsity and won, 1-0.

“Some of the guys might have been a little frustrated that we lost to a bunch of old guys,” said the team captain, Andrew Poolman. “On the other hand, these alums wanted to win this game pretty badly.”

This summer, the team traveled to Brazil, visiting Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro and the national training center, where it held practices.

“At the end of our first training session,” Amorim said, “I told them: ‘You’ve now been to three soccer meccas. One of them you already know.’”

The players laughed. “They understood what I was trying to get at,” Amorim said.

Copyright © 2002 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.