After an emphatic 4-0 win at Loyola Marymount last season, the USD men’s soccer players summoned coach Brian Quinn to the locker room and plopped a bucket hat on his head. And started to sing:
Brian Quinn is magic,
He wears a magic hat
He used to live in Ireland
Well, he said no to that.
The Toreros would close the regular season with four more convincing wins (and sing the magic hat song after each one), clinch the West Coast Conference title a year after being among Division I’s worst teams and get an NCAA Tournament berth for the first time by a San Diego Division I program since 2016.
It was a nice, fun moment, but at a team meeting following the season, Quinn threw the hat in a trash can in a symbolic gesture of moving on to next year.
The hat is gone. The magic is not.
The Toreros (11-4-3, 5-1-1) won the WCC again with a 1-0 victory against Gonzaga on Friday night and Monday morning gathered to learn their assignment in the 48-team NCAA Tournament: Thursday at 7 p.m. at home against WAC champion Cal Baptist (9-5-4), a team they beat 2-0 at Torero Stadium on Sept. 13.
The reward for a favorable first-round draw is less convivial: No. 1 overall seed Marshall (17-2) three days later in Huntington, W.V., for a spot in the Sweet 16. (Here’s the full bracket.)
The magic endured, and so has the song. After beating the Bulldogs at Torero Stadium, players circled a dancing Quinn at midfield and belted it out. The second stanza:
He gets involved in training
He loves it when we fight
And when we win the WCC
We’ll sing this song all night.
That the Toreros are still singing is a testament to Quinn’s coaching, and his roster management. The pandemic restrictions forced him to recruit off recommendations and grainy video clips instead of in-person evaluations, and the result was a 2-15 season in 2021 that he admits was “so, so challenging for the team and myself and everybody around the program.”
The solution: Nineteen players out (including the entire freshman class), 20 players in.
The radical reconstruction took time to coalesce, and the Toreros won just one of their first nine games last season before closing 7-1-1. The need to add only a couple transfers this season and a summer bonding trip to Argentina led to a faster start — road wins at a Seattle team that would finish 12-3-3 and then-No. 6 Washington. The decisive conference win came two weeks ago at Santa Clara, knocking the Broncos out of first place.
Over the past two years, they are 11-1-2 in the WCC after going 1-6 in 2021.
Worst to first.
“Where we are now, I give tons of credit to those guys who stayed around and are enjoying that success,” Quinn said of the four remaining players from the 2-15 nightmare. “Kudos to those guys for ramping it up. The whole thing with college athletics is that chemistry and camaraderie go a long way, and these kids put a lot of effort into that.”
English midfielder Mason Tunbridge, among the most electric players in college soccer (two weeks ago he chipped the goalkeeper from 40 yards), leads the Toreros with seven goals and eight assists. Samy Kanaan, a forward from Rancho Bernardo High School, has six goals. Escondido High alum Cesar Bahena has five.
It’s not just them, though. Nine other players have scored this season, and 12 others have assists. And they rank 11th nationally in shutouts with eight in 18 games.
They also have tournament experience, invaluable in a sport where games are regularly decided by a goal and upsets are common. A year ago, the Toreros drew a 13-win Denver team on the road … in a snowstorm … at altitude … and nearly pulled it off despite a (questionable) red card in the 56th minute. They had a shot hit the crossbar and a header cleared off the line in regulation, then lost 1-0 in overtime.
There will be no snowstorms in the opening round this year, and they’ll play at sea level.
“You have to know how to manage the whole essence of what tournament play is about,” Quinn said. “It’s one-and-done. I think we’re better equipped this year than last year just because of the tournament. Our guys have been there.”
