Scott Swanson
Eric Stutzer is a veteran of Sweet Home soccer – except he’s never actually played for the Huskies.
Stutzer, though, the new boys head coach at Sweet Home High School, has served as an assistant under five head coaches dating back to the start of the program in 1997.
That first year he and Louie Dix co-coached a team that was actually run through the Boys and Girls Club because the high school didn’t have a sanctioned program.
Stutzer, 36, spent most of his childhood in Sweet Home, moving from Idaho when he was 7, and attending local elementary schools before going to East Linn Christian Academy for junior high and high school.
He went to Eugene Bible College, where he earned a four-year degree in counseling and a pastoral minor.
He had played soccer for ELCA and planned to do so in college, but reality got in the way.
“I decided, instead of getting on the five-year plan I’d get on the three-year plan,” he said.
He returned to teach for a couple of years at East Linn, earning a master’s degree in education from the University of Phoenix, then moved to Sweet Home as a substitute at the high school and as a Title 1 teacher at Hawthorne.
Currently, Stutzer oversees Sweet Home’s credit recovery, on-line school and Odysseyware study programs.
Meanwhile, he continued to coach soccer, first with Dix, then with Brett Bowers, Karl Schmidtman, Al Grove and Ryan Regrutto.
The Husky boys have never made the playoffs, but Stutzer has seen some high points, such as the year Schmidtman’s varsity team missed going to state by one game – the program’s best finish so far. And he has had two particularly good years with the JV players, the best two years ago when his team finished 8-3-2.
But at the JV level, and even the varsity, it has depended on who’s been available.
“Success for the JV team has been hit and miss,” Stutzer said. “We don’t have a lot of depth.”
The good news, though, is that those JV players from that 2012 team are now varsity athletes.
“That group of kids is coming through right now. They had a great season. It was exciting,” he said.
At the first official practice of the year on Monday morning, 15 athletes showed up, and that was illustrative of one big challenge for soccer coaches: commitment, he said.
“The commitment level issue is huge. The poverty level and lack of parental support are so high here. Getting kids to commit and follow through with stuff is difficult. It’s hard to get commitment to something when you don’t have a culture that dictates commitment.”
He’s got help, though.
Richard “Huck” Thomas, who heads the local American Youth Soccer Program that has become a feeder for the high school boys and girls programs, is helping Stutzer coach.
“He’s a nationally certified coach, a coach of coaches,” Stutzer said. “We’re really looking to change the level of commitment, the culture, and focusing on youth programs is what it’s all about.”
Playing against teams from communities in which soccer culture runs strong, the Huskies have traditionally been at a disadvantage, he said.
“It’s hard to be competitive when you get to high school and you don’t know how to kick a ball properly,” he said. “They should be working on tactics and they’re working on fundamentals.”
Partnering with AYSO to develop players is a way to address that, Stutzer said, and that’s his method.
“We really want to change the soccer culture in this community,” he said. “It’s happening.”