By Heather Monahan
Features Assignment Editor
Stepping into the role of head coach can be intimidating if you’re following up someone with a track record like Manoj Khettry.
The former head coach of the St. Bonaventure women’s soccer team successfully led the team to five consecutive Atlantic 10 tournaments, only one of three schools to have done so. However, new Head Coach Steve Brdarski is bringing his experience to St. Bonaventure, determined to continue moving the team forward.
Before coming to St. Bonaventure, Brdarski held the position of assistant women’s coach, head men’s coach and head coach at Longwood University in Virginia.
“There are a lot of things I did while coaching at (Longwood) University,” Brdarski said. “One of which was working with a professional women’s team in Indiana called FC Indiana. That was neat because I was still coaching college soccer, but also pushing myself in another direction to be able to work with players at a higher level.”
In addition to accepting the coaching position at Bonaventure, Brdarski has also recently become the head coach of the Haitian women’s U-20 national team.
“I’ve yet to have my first tournament with them, that’s actually going to be taking place in the coming months and I look forward to that,” he said. “It’s another challenge dealing with certain things and certain obstacles.”
Brdarski said he has enjoyed his experiences with his previous teams thus far, but looks forward to working with the Bonaventure women’s team.
“With a new coach, there’s transition and that can be a challenge for the players,” Brdarski said. “But I love it here. I’m lucky for the team that we have and that they’re good people off the soccer field and great players on the soccer field.”
While Brdarski enjoys working with the team, he also appreciates other individuals at the university.
“There’s a lot of great people that sometimes you don’t see,” he said. “Our strength coach, our academic coach, professors. There’s a lot of people that help these girls out and it’s good to be able to work with them on a one-on-one basis.”
Though the coming season is still in the future, Brdarski said he’s been working on three main things with the women these past few weeks. The first is team spirit.
“Identifying team spirit and getting the team to really work for each other and be there for each other can only happen if you have great leadership,” Brdarski said. “So we’ve tried to be fostering the roles of the six rising seniors, getting as much leadership out of them as possible.”
Brdarski said the second thing the team has been doing so far is testing themselves.
“We haven’t really decided how we want to play, this has been ‘Let’s test ourselves,’” he said. “Let’s test ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally as a team and see where we need improvement and what we can bank on as being strengths of ours.”
The third thing the new head coach has been working on with the women is the team’s values.
“I want each one of the girls on this team to know I care about them first as people,” he said. “I’ve also tried to find out about their ambitions and goals. A lot of times, coaches put handcuffs on players, like ‘Here’s your box, stay inside it.’ This spring, I’ve tried to eliminate the box; there is no box. Be yourself, be passionate. Really play with personality and let’s develop that more.”
Brdarski said he’s excited to work more with the team in the coming months, and specifically looks forward to May 17, when they leave for a team trip to Europe.
“We’re going to Spain and France,” Brdarski said. “We get to go to, what I would consider right now, the Mecca of soccer in terms of our first stop in Barcelona. There is where we’ll start the transition from this getting to know you phase to actually starting to move towards what we want to do in the fall and what kind of team we want to be.”
The team also gets a unique experience as they get to play professional teams in Spain and France and see a professional game.
“We’ll actually get to see Barcelona play one of their last regular season games,” Brdarski said. “We’ll get to see them play a game in a stadium of 100,000 people and that in itself is worth the trip.”
While he’s still getting accustomed to his new team, Brdarski said he’s very happy and feels lucky to be part of a program with such great alumni.
“The alumni base of this university is one of a kind,” he said. “I’m blessed with the players that I have, and the tradition of this program, the players that have come before, are pretty amazing. We really want (alumni) to be a part of this program. The sweat, work and energy that’s been put in by these alumni, that’s one of the things that motivates me as a coach and it motivates our program.”
