With 50th Season,
Tocco Cements Reputation as Soccer Icon
Kaleb Jackson, ’18, talks to head soccer coach Tony Tocco after a soccer game.
M
en’s head soccer coach Tony Tocco added some more gold to an already decorated career this spring as he embarked on his 50th campaign with the team, a milestone by any standard.
This kind of longevity wasn’t even necessarily what Tocco said he had in mind when he came to Rockhurst.
“I was just in the right place at the right time,” he said. “I was at Rockhurst applying for an accounting position, and I thought the contract they offered was a little on the low side. Then the president (the Rev. Robert Weiss, S.J.) came back and said, ‘You played soccer?’” It turned out that Gene Hart, then the University’s athletic director and soccer coach, needed an assistant. Tocco said he accepted. “It was something I thought I could do for a couple years and get to know the student body better,” he said. Hart would later step back from the head coaching job to concentrate on AD duties. Tocco found himself at the helm of the Hawks and never looked back. No stranger to collegiate soccer, Tocco was part of the undefeated 1964 Saint Louis University squad, as well as a pitcher for the Billikens baseball team during its 1965 College Baseball World Series run. Coming from the city’s longstanding soccer culture, a lot of the game was already familiar. But Tocco said he had a lot to learn about coaching a team and developing a strategy. By the mid-1980s, soccer had grown in the Kansas City area, expanding Tocco’s recruiting pool. And with some early postseason runs, Tocco said, the pieces started coming together. “I knew what it took to become consistently good,” he said.
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SPRING 2021
