Nicholls soccer coach has built career on turning struggling programs around

When you have made it your life’s work to turn around struggling college soccer programs at various levels like Nicholls women’s coach Robert Podeyn, you develop some valuable insights.

“If I equate it to just looking at the levels, NAIA, is one extreme to the other. When teams are really good, they’re really good. When they’re really bad, they’re really bad,” said Podeyn, who is heading into his third year as Lady Colonels coach.

What about Division II?

“I think it’s probably the most competitive level overall,” Podeyn offered. “I’m not saying they are better, just more competitive. It’s more competitive because you can’t predict who’s going to win the national championship accurately at Division II. Every year the Final Four has got a team that wasn’t even ranked in the Top 25.”

How about Division I?

“When you look at Division I, I could sit here and name ten programs,” said Podeyn. “Out of those ten, four will be in the Final Four for the next ten years. It’s not going to change. That’s just the way it is.

“You know it’s always going to be North Carolina. It’s always going to be UCLA. It’s always going to be Stanford. Georgetown will be in there. Duke will be in there. You know Florida State will be in there.”

“Those teams are always going to be the teams that are going to dominate Division I because they’re getting all the national team players and national pool players,” he continued. “They’ve already got the branding and the identification. You look at Division I as a whole, the best players in the country played Division I. The best players from other countries come in and play Division I.”

Podeyn has served as head coach at all three of those levels, but no matter the level, the assessment process, Podeyn said, is pretty much the same.

“You have to look at the current state of the program,” Podeyn explained. “What do you have? What do you need? What can work? What’s not working?”

“You then have to look at the community. Can the community sustain a program? When I say sustain, I’m talking about fan base. I’m talking about community involvement in athletics. All of those things.”

It also takes a bit of being able to gaze into the future.

“Then you’ve got to look at what’s it going to take to compete with the teams that you need to compete with in the conference, and then beyond. So what’s the level like there? What’s the gap?” Podeyn said.

When Podeyn arrived at Nicholls in 2022, he arrived only three weeks before preseason began.

“When I got here, that’s where I started to kind of assess things: Great people. Loved the people. Great kids. They wanted to be successful. Nobody wants to lose, but they definitely wanted to be successful. They wanted to be better than they were. They were committed to that,” Podeyn said of the Lady Colonels and the Nicholls soccer program.

He also found something else.

“I walked into a building that looked like, as a maintenance worker said, it looked like the day after a frat party,” Podeyn laughed as he recalled the scene. “There was garbage everywhere. There’s broken tables and chairs. There were old futon couches that were 15 years old. They smelled terrible. There was a broken BBQ grill in the back that was trash. There were boxes outside that were full of pots, pans, and stuff that needed to be thrown away.

“There’s stuff in the front. It looked like Sanford and Son.”

By Podeyn’s estimate, 15, 44-gallon trash bags were thrown out, and that was just from what was inside the building.

During the process of the cleanup, the members of the Lady Colonels soccer team arrived on campus.

“Then the kids came in and saw what we were doing and said, ‘hey, can we help?’ So they chipped in, they wanted to take ownership. So they did some painting, and they made the building nice to where I think it’s one of the nicer facilities we have for athletics on campus,” said Podeyn.

After serving as an assistant of the men’s soccer team at Division I Central Florida, Podeyn’s first head coaching assignment came in 2003 as the women and men’s coach at William Woods, a NAIA school in Missouri.

I’m walking into a situation where I think I’m ready, but until you are a head coach, you’re you have no idea what you’re in for,” Podeyn said. “And it was three years of trying to do two full-time jobs, which was ridiculously hard. You can never make both programs happy because each one needs something different from you.

“If you’re not willing to work 90 hours a week in that situation – and I was already doing that – you’re not going to be happy with it.”

Podeyn went 29-27-1 as the women’s coach and 19-25-6 as men’s coach in his three years at the school before taking the women’s job at Northwood College in Texas, another NAIA school.

When I went into Northwood it was about as bad a shape as you can get for a program overall,” Podeyn said. “They had ten players in June when I took over the program.

“They work on quarters (academic terms), so I couldn’t wait for the kids to come back in because they didn’t begin until after Labor Day. By then, we were four games in, so I couldn’t wait for kids to come back in to try and solicit that base to come into the team. So, I had to find kids.”

“I think we started the first two games, we had 12 players, the next two we had 13,” he continued. “I ended up in those four games, two I finished with ten, two I finished with 11.”

His first year at Northwood, the team posted a 3-12 mark. In his final season in 2008, he guided the team that was once ranked No. 212 in NAIA to the national tournament and a ranking as high as No. 29.

Podeyn then moved up to the Division II level at women’s coach at Southwest Baptist in Missouri.

Depending on your point of view, what Podeyn stepped into at Southwest Baptist was either a situation comedy or a horror movie.

Podeyn predecessor at Southwest Baptist had left the team in the middle of the 2009 season. Not telling anyone except for a couple of athletic administrators and his assistant coaches, the Southwest Baptist coach left to take part in the TV show, Survivor: Tocantins.

In not informing his players of the reason for his abrupt departure, the coach led them to believe he was going to a California hospital to undergo tests for a brain tumor, according to Podeyn.

“Nobody knew except those two people (assistant athletic directors) and his assistant coaches. But the assistants didn’t share it with anybody, so the team didn’t know and they’re fund-raising money and they raised, like, I don’t know, $8,000 for him,” Podeyn said.

Following the filming of the show, the coach returned, only to be fired by the school’s athletic director.

“He came back in like, I don’t know, November, and basically said, ‘yeah, I didn’t have a brain tumor. I didn’t have brain cancer. I was on a TV show,’” Podeyn recalled.

That left Podeyn in the middle of a house divided. School administrators were split. Some wanted to retain the coach, others wanted him fired. The soccer players were also divided, with some who loved the colorful coach, while others despised him, according to Podeyn.

The ordeal, Podeyn said, negatively affected the program for the next several years. The team went 7-9-3 and 6-9-3 over the next two seasons before bottoming out at 4-12-2 in 2011.

Following the 2011 season, the administrators who had backed the previous coach were fired and the new athletic administration allowed Podeyn to make much-need changes in team personnel that had been thwarted by the now-fired administrators, according the Podeyn.

“When (the administrators were finally fired) I was able to make a large change and that’s when we went seven wins, 14 and then 16 (over the next three years),” Podeyn said.

During the final two years, Southwest Baptist advanced to the Division II national tournament. The Bearcats lost in the opening round both years to Winona College of Minnesota. Southwest Baptist lost on both occasions on penalty kicks in overtime.

Podeyn spent the next six years at Fresno Pacific, another Division II team. He guided Fresno Baptist to a 54-49-14 mark before gaining his first Division I head coaching job at Nicholls.

Taking over a program that had only one winning season in 25 years, Podeyn inherited a team that went 0-18 the previous season.

“It was a frustrating season to kind of go through to know that in every game you’re the underdog,” Podeyn said. “But the kids are battling and when we tried to get them to where they at least stepped on the field believing they could compete in every game. Prior to that they hadn’t. They would step on the field like, ‘yeah, we’re just going to play soccer, we’re going to lose and we’re going to eat. So, where are we eating?’

“We got them to the point where they at least stepped on the field, ‘hey, we can do this.’ They started to compete, but they just weren’t successful. But we were able to kind of change the numbers a little bit. We did score a couple goals. We were able to trim down the goals against. We took a few more shots, allowed fewer shots in that first season, but we were still 0-18. We weren’t very good.”

Then came some tough decisions.

“We had to make a lot of changes,” Podeyn said. “We ended up making 19 changes to the roster. We brought in what I thought was 19 players at the time that was going to completely change the team. There was one transfer kid, a goalkeeper, who came in in the spring, but we literally made all those changes in one day.

“I sat down with everybody. You don’t like to remove a Band-Aid really slowly. You want to do it just quick. We had 29 meetings in one day. We literally just got it all done. When the dust settled, we had 12 players left at that point. I met with those 12 and said, ‘OK, this is what we’re moving forward with. We’re not making any more changes.”

Things were looking up heading into the 2022 season, Podeyn said, until he lost several players for varied reasons.

One player decided to turn professional and stayed in her native Sweden. A player from Germany informed the coach she was in love and returning home. Another player was lost for the season due to an injury.

“All three pieces we looked at as being the starters were done,” said Podeyn said. “Now we’re back to the midfield we were looking at that we had when we were 0-18. We had a new defense. We had new attackers, but in a 4-3-3 the way we play, if you don’t have that triangle mid, you’re not going to be successful.

“We tried other things. We moved players around to try and make it happen, but ultimately, we just weren’t strong enough in the middle to compete consistently for 90 minutes. So, we went to 2-16-1. We scored more goals than we had the last three years. We allowed fewer shots than we had in the last three years. We took more shots than we had in the last three years. There were more corner kicks and we allowed fewer corner kicks. Everything was trending in the right direction – except the wins.”

Yet, there were a few wins. The Lady Colonels went 2-16-1. A 1-0 win over Jackson State snapped a streak of 51 games without a victory.

“At that point it was almost like – finally,” Podeyn said with a huge sigh of relief. “Until then, you start kind of thinking to yourself, ‘I know I see It, but we’re not getting a result. Is it working?’  To actually get a result, even though it was just the one at that point, I think at least it sent a message to the players that, ‘hey, we can win.’ We just we got to kind of stay in the process, stay focused, especially since Jackson State went on to win their conference and go to the national tournament.”

With the newcomers from a season ago back with a year of experience, coupled with the return of some injured players a few additional players, if nothing else, the Lady Colonels will be a deeper team going into the 2023 season.

“Right now, I think we’re done with the rebuild. I think it’s more the building part. “We’ve got to build the team we’ve got,” said Podeyn said.

“I’m already done with recruiting for ’24,” the coach continued. “Maybe I’ll get one or two players that I’ll get to come in, but we’re done. In ’25, I’m not looking for a lot of players. So the team we have this year will be the team we have next year, will be the team we have the year after. This team is together for two, maybe three years.

“It’s kind of fun to say, ‘hey, the starting eleven I have this year could be the same starting eleven next year.”