After 20 years under Ralph Ferrigno, the men's soccer team will be heading in a new direction come next fall. And athletic director Bill Gehling thinks he has found just the man to lead it: Carl Junot.
The 30-year-old former assistant coach at Harvard emerged from an applicant pool of close to 150 candidates to earn the title as the next head coach of Tufts. He will be replacing the all-time leader in coaching victories at Tufts in Ferrigno, a coach who basically made Tufts' soccer program what it is today.
A field of six candidates was selected to come in for interviews. When all was said and done, Gehling and his committee saw Junot as the best fit for the program's long- and short-term goals.
"We are looking for pretty much the same criteria for all our coaches now," Gehling said. "The way I define success is: a) competitive success on the field, b) experiential success — we want to make sure our student athletes have a great experience while they are here that they will never forget. Those are the two kind of main qualities, and the third is that we want somebody that will embrace their role as being a member of the community."
The players are ready to embrace the change that Junot should carry with him to Medford. He will bring his methods from the Div. I level at Harvard, where he has worked for the last two years as an assistant to Jamie Clark. While with the Crimson, Junot was responsible for team development, in particular recruitment, video analysis and off-season player development. He worked with the likes of two-time Herman/MAC Trophy finalist Andre Akpan and was named a top assistant in 2008 by College Soccer News.
Prior to his time in the Northeast, Junot was a part of the staff at the University of New Mexico for seven years, first as an assistant and then as associate head coach. He helped lead the Lobos to the national finals in 2005 and was part of a staff that had its team ranked No. 1 nationally at times during 2004 and 2005.
"Some of the universities I have been at — two of the universities I have been at — are much more like Tufts than typical Div. I universities," Junot said. "My undergraduate career was spent at Furman University in South Carolina, which is Div. I, but their academic mission is very similar to Tufts. And then of course Harvard I think is pretty close. But even so, among all the Div. I schools and universities and conferences, the Ivy League is probably most like Div. III. That kind of made me comfortable in making that transition, whereas if I had come from the University of New Mexico directly, I might not have been as comfortable in terms of not being able to make that connection and bridge that gap."
Junot will be taking over a team that followed up a promising 8-6-1 campaign in 2008 with a disappointing 2009 season. Tufts won just two games all year (2-10-2) and struggled in NESCAC play, emerging with a 0-8-1 in-conference record. The Jumbos were left out of the NESCAC Tournament for the second time in the last three years; under Ferrigno, the team only made it past the first round once since the tournament's inception in 2000, when it went to the semifinals in 2001.
"I think after last season's lack of success, the team needs something to completely reshape it and get it out of that funk, and this is something that I definitely think was necessary for the team and the program," said Naji Muakkassa, who will be one of four senior captains for the team next fall.
Though Ferrigno will no longer be prowling the sidelines, he has left a veteran roster on the Hill that will feature nine seniors next season. With that in mind, Gehling sought the advice of three of the four rising seniors who will be captains next season — the incumbent Muakkassa and classmates Ron Coleman and Chris Flaherty — when he and the committee had whittled down the pool. The fourth captain for next season, Josh Molofsky, was abroad, but the leaders tried to find a coach who would fit their team.
"I don't know if any other athletic director at other schools would have taken the time out of his day to meet with us and really listen to our input," Muakkassa said. "Once they narrowed down the field and conducted interviews on campus, the captains were allowed to speak with applicants after they had interviewed with Gehling and the athletic department committee. And he asked us to give him our input on each coach individually. I don't know how much he looked into it, but it obviously meant something to him to ask us to write something about each candidate and for him to read it."
Among the applicants that Muakkassa and his teammates met with, they felt an immediate connection with Junot.
"Right off the bat, he was very easy to talk to — he was very approachable," Muakkassa said. "We started asking questions, and with some of the other coaches, for maybe the first 10 minutes it was a bit shaky, as you can imagine. You don't really know them and they don't really know you, so it is a bit awkward. With Coach Junot, right off the bat it seemed like something had clicked. He was enthusiastic about the job — not that other applicants weren't — but he was very excited and he seemed very genuine that he wanted to come here and really change the program."
But first and foremost, the team was looking for someone who knows the game of soccer. Junot has had an extensive coaching career since his playing days at Furman University, where he was a team captain and All-Region honoree in his senior season in 2001. The San Antonio native will bring a different style than Ferrigno, who was born and raised in England and got most of his experience there. It certainly doesn't hurt that Junot comes highly recommended from some of the best minds in the game. Clark played in the MLS before moving on to a coaching career, and his father, Bobby, was the former manager of the New Zealand national team.
"We are looking for somebody who has expertise in the game of soccer," Gehling said. "Coach Junot, at Harvard, worked under a coach named Jamie Clark who I know very well. And I felt that from [him] that I could get a really good sense of Carl's knowledge as a coach and style as a coach."
As much value as Gehling and his committee placed on the aspects of what they will see on the field, they also went in knowing that a college sports program is about more than the results on the scoreboard. The group was looking for someone to fit Tufts and help bring new ideas to a program that needed a reboot.
"Just like any other program, when you have a coach who has been here for a long time, some things get stagnant, and that is natural," Muakkassa said. "Getting fresh blood in here is really exciting. He has a lot of different ideas and new thoughts on how to change the program and how to do things differently — certainly with style of play, practices, team mentality, stuff like that. I think he definitely has ideas on what to do."
"I think in terms of running the program my goal is to run a classy program," Junot added. "And to do that with pursuit of excellence in terms of athletics, while not compromising anything there, I want to put that into the greater mission of the university.
"And that is where my experience at Harvard I think will help me," he continued. "Not even in terms of how similar they were, but in that Harvard really asks the coaching staff to run their program within the mission of the greater university. So that is probably going to be my number one goal in terms of running the program. I think within that I hope the players see me as an educator to them athletically, academically and socially as well. So those are kind of going to be the pillars of the program."
Still, that doesn't mean that Junot is not going to try to bring his own brand of play over from Cambridge. As part of a Harvard coaching staff that brought the team to the third round of the NCAA Tournament last season, he is an accomplished coach on the field as well. Junot would like to bring similar success to Tufts and take the program to new heights.
"I think our goal is to finish within the top half of the conference and to qualify for the conference tournament," he said. "What that means is we are going to have a pretty simple and organized philosophy. We are going to identify our offensive strengths and try to play to our strengths. Within those two areas, I'd like to be able to play a pretty exciting style of soccer, and of course that would be contingent on our current personnel."
Gehling and the Athletics Department are confident that Junot can turn the program around. After a lengthy process to find a new coach to lead the program, Junot certainly stood out among all the applicants through both his credentials and his character.
"At the end of the day, you are looking to hire a person, and it was the interview process that really convinced us that Carl was a great fit for Tufts," Gehling said. "Even though the bulk of his experience — all of his experience really — has been at the Div. I level, it was very obvious to all of us that philosophically, he was a great match for Tufts and that he really appreciates the non-athletic side of coaching. The educational side of coaching, being a part of a community and the team building piece, he is very good at those components and really buys into the importance of those components."
After a dismal 2009 campaign, Tufts has nowhere to go but up. And with an experienced squad and some strong underclassmen who got the chance to play last season, it should see results in 2010. Junot sees a team that is not that far from getting back to the top half of the NESCAC, and he is hoping that he can help the team achieve that goal as soon as next season.
"Reflecting on last year in terms of just looking at their schedule and talking to some of the upperclassmen and to administration that got to know the team pretty well, there were a lot of games they lost by one goal, which kind of leads me to believe that they are very close," he said. "And maybe just a little bit of momentum that a coach like myself can bring to the program will help us bridge that gap and end up on the winning side in a few of those games."
