DEREK ARMSTRONG: A Nomad Finds a Home in Sunny San Diego
On a warm, glorious day in 1980 an English soccer junkie “on holiday” during his first visit to San Diego stepped outside the Ski Beach motel room where he was staying and surveyed the watery wonderland of Mission Bay.
“I looked around and said, ‘My god, this is pretty idyllic,’” recalled Armstrong. Soon afterwards Armstrong jumped at the chance to take over the Nomads SC, which he turned into one of the nation’s top soccer clubs.
Armstrong wasn’t the first to be seduced by San Diego’s lush surroundings and he won’t be the last but his relocation here into the Southern California soccer world has left some major footprints that will be hard to fill when the 71-year-old patriarch finally decides to retire from coaching.
That may wind up being much later than sooner.
A recent visit to Armstrong at one of the Nomads’ fields found him in top form, striding forcefully across the pitch in his trademark blue sweats. A diminutive figure with a commanding bark, Armstrong shouted out instructions to his Boys U18 Academy team.
“Let’s get the ball rolling on the ground!”
“A little imagination, for God’s sake!”
“Play him, play him, then go wide!”
Multiply decades of shouts of encouragement and exasperation and you’d think that he’d at least lose his voice, if not his passion for the game.
“I don’t feel 71,” when asked when he might finally retire. “As long as I’m enjoying it and I have my health I think that I have a role to play in making the club even better. And my wife says I’m busier now than I’ve ever been.”
Actually, Armstrong’s had his hands full ever since he decided to stay in San Diego. A few of his achievements include:
- His Nomads boys and girls teams have won hundreds of local, state and national tournaments and sent dozens of players on to professional careers and into youth soccer coaching ranks.
- Founding member of US Club Soccer.
- UC San Diego men’s team coach for 26 years. Won NCAA Division III national titles in 1988, 1991 and 1993 and made the NCAA playoffs 16 times.
- Served as a prime mover in the US Soccer Development Academy program in which the Nomads were one of the original 11 clubs across the country chosen to participate.
Along the way Armstrong has made friends and enemies but his achievements have always been respected.
“That program and what he has been able to accomplish have set a standard that has made it a target for other clubs in Southern California and raised the quality of play everywhere,” said Noah Gins, the director of the Albion Soccer Club in San Diego.
The Nomads have ridden the rising tide of youth soccer here in Southern California and across the nation in ways that also have provided huge benefits for the citizens of San Diego.
Each year the Nomads stage two major tournaments – one in spring and one over Thanksgiving – in which over 1,000 teams from across the country and abroad participate. Similar tournaments are also held by rival superclub Surf and the impact on the community’s economy is huge. Hundreds of hotel rooms are filled, rental cars rented and restaurants jammed with out-of-town players and their families.
“The Nomads just got an award from the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau as Customer of the Year,” Armstrong said. “We brought in about $22 million a year by filling all the hotels and we’ve never taken a penny in support from them.”
Armstrong would like city and county officials to pay more attention to this economic benefit by backing the Nomads in their goal of finding a location in which a huge soccer park could be built to draw more teams and events to San Diego.
San Diego teams have long complained about having to drive as far away as Lancaster and Bakersfield to play in state tournaments but the reality is that with the exception of the Surf fields, there are no San Diego complexes that come close to being able to handle soccer tournaments that are growing in size each year.
And San Diego’s competitors have noticed, said Armstrong.
“I go to cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas and all across the country and I find these huge complexes spring up,” he said. “We’re getting killed by Vegas now. They built three 17-field complexes and it’s a major fight for us to get teams to come here instead of going there.
“The officials have to grasp the fact that there are huge economic factors involved and a day doesn’t go by that one of our staff members here isn’t working on this. Youth soccer is a huge business now.”
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| FAR FROM HOME --- There’s a softer side to the rough Derek Armstrong that most of his players see every day on the pitch. Above Armstrong (L) is pictured with other relief workers pitching in to help kids in Thailand with volunteer soccer clinics after the disastrous 2006 tsunamis. |
Part of that explosive growth is from television, Armstrong said.
“When I first came here I ran a little wire antenna from my radio up to the roof of my house so I could try to dial in the BBC and get the English Premier League results,” he said.
“Now, soccer’s on television everywhere. ESPN, The Fox Soccer Channel, it seems like wherever you tune in you can find a game.”
None more important, in his mind, than the famous 1999 game in the Rose Bowl in which the U.S. Women’s team defeated China to win the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
“That was huge because it was televised and got national attention and it opened the door of opportunity to lots of girls who watched that and said that’s what I want to do. It really triggered an explosion of new girls coming into the sport.”
Armstrong is optimistic about the future of U.S. soccer. “I only see us getting better, he said. “The success of Major League Soccer is the key. If it succeeds, it offers kids a professional option to baseball, football and basketball.
“Could you imagine if we could get some of these big, strong athletic kids who play cornerback in football to play center backs for us? We’d have players who could match up very well against Europeans and Brazilians.”
The big challenge, said Armstrong, may not be the talent pool. It may be the financial pool.
“It’s getting expensive to run these soccer programs and we’re facing some real challenges there,” he said. “I think the Academy system is doing a great job of developing better skills and soccer savvy but the travel costs involved in playing across the country are very significant.”
In addition, while many of the best young players are Hispanic, many of them come from families that cannot afford club soccer, he said.
“The better players do tend to be Hispanic and they are poor and we do what we can to help,” Armstrong said. “About 80 percent of our kids are Hispanic and we provide scholarships to about 150 out of about 350. We’re very proud of that but it is a lot of money.”
There’s also a disturbing ripple effect on youth soccer from the economic hits that have hit park and recreation departments in the wake of the recession.
“Seeing cities struggle at the park and recreation level is very distressing,” he said. “Fields are deteriorating so badly that a lot of kids are now playing on dirt where there used to be grass.”
Armstrong is looking forward to the upcoming World Cup and still roots for his native England, where he once played for then First-Division side Blackpool.
“I told the boys that if England’s playing we’re not practicing that day,” he said.
Writer Bill Callahan is a contributing journalist who has shared Pulitzer Prizes as a reporter and an editor with the staffs of the San Diego Evening Tribune and the San Diego Union-Tribune. He and his wife are the parents of boy playing club soccer and Callahan has served for several years as a team manager. We hope you enjoyed the article. Please feel free to share your comments with us!
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