News: Jim Pollihan Passed away 2-10-23

Discussion in 'Pro Indoor Soccer' started by cardshopmd, Feb 13, 2023.

  1. cardshopmd

    cardshopmd Member

    Sep 9, 2008
    Baltimore
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I just got word that Jim Pollihan Passed away on 2-10-23

    Jim Pollihan prior to a Harrisburg Heat home game in January 1993. (Michael Lewis/FrontRowSoccer.com)

    By Michael Lewis

    FrontRowSoccer.com Editor

    Former U.S. international defender Jim Pollihan, who scored the first goal in American professional indoor soccer with the New York Arrows in 1978, passed away on Sunday night.

    He was 68.

    Pollihan is survived by his wife Barbara, and daughter Madison.

    Known to his countless friends as Polly, Pollihan forged a long career in soccer, indoors and outdoors, playing in the original North American Soccer League before moving to the indoor game as a player and then as a coach and eventually a general manager.

    He was a member of the Arrows’ first Major Indoor Soccer League championship team in 1978-79 before joining the Houston Summit the next season. After the Texas side moved to the Maryland, Pollihan played four years with the Baltimore Blast.

    A history maker

    On a star-studded team that boasted plenty of firepower behind the likes of the high-scoring Branko Segota and Pat Ercoli (Steve Zungul did not compete in that match), Pollihan was an unlikely candidate to strike for the first goal in MISL history. He was a defender who wasn’t known to fill the net.

    Still, he wrote his name into the history books, accomplishing that feat in the six-team league’s inaugural game for the Arrows against the Cincinnati Kids on Dec. 22, 1978. While overlapping on the left flank at 2:10 of the second quarter, Pollihan drilled a return pass from Luis Alberto past goalkeeper Keith Van Eron; the first of thousands of indoor goals.

    Years later, Pollihan admitted that he didn’t think twice about his accomplishment.

    “Nothing special,” he told this writer. “It didn’t dawn on me that this was the first goal. We had no idea how this league was going to be accepted, how long it would be around. So, it was no big celebration on my part. I was excited that a goal was scored, but we knew that in indoor soccer there was going to be more than one goal scored in that game.”

    He was correct about that.

    For an inaugural game that ushered in a new sport, the game at the Coliseum certainly had plenty of hoopla. Pete Rose, who was still playing baseball, and was about to sign as a free agent with the Philadelphia Phillies, and was part-owner of the Kids, kicked out the first ball. The Arrows won that match.

    “It was an exciting time,” Pollihan said.

    The great indoors

    For Pollihan and his Lancers teammates, indoor soccer was an opportunity to keep in shape and earn a living playing the sport they loved so much. At the time, he, like the other American players, earned several thousand dollars a season.

    “It was not large by any means,” he said. “The pay during the season was enough that I didn’t have to do work on any other jobs. When the season was over my pay would stop and I would have to find something to do. When the league came about, the pay scale was relatively low. … It allowed us the pleasure of getting paid to do something we love instead of finding a job in the offseason. The [MISL] salaries initially for the most part were entry level. The salaries grew very quickly. When the NASL started losing teams, the top NASL players came into the indoor game, and in some cases were making more money in the indoor game than the outdoor game.”

    And it gave the Americans an opportunity to develop.

    “We needed to play all-year round, not just during one season, the NASL season; 24 games, you were not getting a lot of time on the field,” Pollihan said. “You had a ton of down time in the offseason. We needed, as Americans, to really grow to compete with the South Americans and Europeans who were coming in to play consistently.

    “It seemed like a very interesting and rewarding thing for players, where we could play year around. Play indoors in the winter, and go back to the NASL in the spring and the summer. Basically, be fulltime professional soccer players. It looked like to be very promising in that respect.”

    The MISL lasted until 1982, but indoor soccer has been around for 44-plus years in several leagues, including the American Indoor Soccer Association (which became the National Professional Soccer League), Continental Indoor Soccer League, World Indoor Soccer League, Xtreme Soccer League, the second incarnation of the MISL and the Major Arena Soccer League, among others.

    The early years

    Beyond making MISL history, Pollihan forged a remarkable soccer career on and off of the field.

    He was an all-star caliber player who was a regular at left back for the U.S. men’s national team during an era in which the team had a handful of opportunities to play each year.

    Born in St. Louis, Mo. on Feb. 13, 1954, Pollihan grew up playing soccer in a city known for the sport. The St. Barts C.Y.C. Junior Peppsi League team that he was a part of won the U.S. Soccer Football Association national junior championship in 1970-71.

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    Jim Pollihan and former Lancers goalkeeper Jim May at a team reunion in 2010. (Joy Rubenstein/FrontRowSoccer.com)

    At Quincy, Pollihan was a high scoring forward with the most dominant NAIA team from the late sixties through the eighties. He led the Hawks to three consecutive titles and was named the NAIA tournament’s outstanding forward each time, earning tourney MVP honors in 1974. He also was an NAIA second team All American in 1974, and an honorable mention in 1975. Not surprisingly, he was inducted into the NAIA soccer Hall of Fame in 1982 and into the Quincy University Hall of Fame (the school changed its name years ago).

    After finishing the 1975 NASL season at 6-16, the Lancers owned the third overall pick of the 1976 NASL draft and selected Pollihan, a Quincy College center forward and a two-time National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics honoree.

    Benedictine College head soccer coach Terry Hanson, whom the Lancers hired as director of marketing and public relations, said that he played a vital role in drafting Pollihan.

    “I tried to recruit him out of high school,” he said. “Every time we played Quincy, he killed us. I said he would never again be on a team where he kills me. I sat down with coach Dragan Popovic and recommended to draft Jim No. 1.”

    Which he did.

    From forward to defense

    At the time, not many American forwards were playing regularly. With Popovic using a good chunk of his small player budget on foreign players, such as striker Mike Stojanovic, Americans were high-scoring forwards in college either sat or were moved to the back on defense.

    Pollihan wound up with the latter, starring at left back for most of his five-year outdoor career,

    “I asked Jim if he wanted to play. He said yes, and I put him on defense,” Lancers head coach Don (Dragan) Popovic Popovic said. “He’s the best American I have. I tried everybody at left defense. … I tried him for a few intrasquad games. He didn’t make any glaring mistakes, so the job’s his.”

    Pollihan did play some up front in 1978 when injuries decimated the Lancers’ forward line.

    [​IMG]

    Jim Pollihan writing down his lineup prior to a road match for the Heat in 1992. (Michael Lewis/FrontRowSocccer.com)

    In 1976, the 6-1, 185-lb. Pollihan was a fast study at left back, learning the position quickly and becoming one of the best U.S.-born players in the league. He was a finalist for rookie of the year in 1976, as Dallas Tornado defender Steve Pecher secured the honors.

    Perhaps his most important save came after a controversial 3-2 loss to the Chicago Sting before a cozy crowd of 3,037 at behemoth Soldier Field on June 1, 1976, when he pulled an irate Popovic away from English referee Bob Matthewson after the game ended. Popovic was arguing with the referee.

    Awards aside, the big thing for any American playing in the NASL and accruing minutes. The league had regulations to play at least two Americans – natural or naturalized on the field at all times or face stiff sanctions from the league. During his five-year tenure with the Lancers, Pollihan played 131 times, the second most in the team’s 14-year history. He started most, if not all of those matches, collecting six goals and nine assists. His most productive season was when he was used up front in 1978 after the forward position was decimated by injuries. Pollihan acquitted himself well, scoring five goals and assisted on three others.

    In 1977, Pollihan was part of a physical backline that spearheaded the Lancers into the NASL playoffs. After recording only one road win during the regular season, Rochester defeated the St. Louis Stars in a shootout in the first round and upended the favored and defending champion Toronto Metros-Croatia in the quarterfinals. He was a part of the famous 1-0 win at Varsity Stadium in Toronto, in which the Lancers played almost half of the match two players down due to a pair of red cards. Rochester eventually came back down to earth against Pele and the New York Cosmos in the semifinals, dropping both games.

    In a unique double, Pollihan earned the respect of his coach and his peers. He was named team captain by Popovic. At the advent of the NASL Players Association, he also was selected as the Lancers’ player representative. He worked overtime and a half trying to get as many teammates as possible not to play during a rather contentious NASL players strike on April 15, 1979. It lasted one weekend but made national headlines and waves.

    Pollihan made his U.S. men’s national team debut in a 1-1 draw at Canada in a World Cup qualifier on Sept. 24, 1976. His final appearance came in that 6-0 shellacking by France at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. in 1979.

    He was inducted into the Lancers Wall of Fame in 2017.

    Feeling the Harrisburg Heat

    He played for six indoor seasons – the St. Louis native recorded 35 goals 48 assists before entering the coaching ranks as a Blast assistant from 1986-91. He left the MISL to become the first head coach of the expansion Harrisburg Heat in the National Professional Soccer League. While he never won a title, although the team reached the 1995 championship series – Pollihan guided the side into the playoffs for his first seven seasons.

    That Heat team included several players that went on to fame in soccer:

    * Bob Lilley, who directed several USL Championship teams, most recently the Pittsburgh Riverhounds.

    * Danny Kelly, who coached the Baltimore Blast to six MASL crowns, and six in a row

    * Current Blast head coach David Bascome, who was a member of the Bermuda national team

    * Doug Miller, who enjoyed a long indoor and outdoor career. He scored a goal for the Rochester Rhinos, who became the last non-MLS side to win the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, in 1999.

    * Todd Smith, who became New England Revolution general manager before he passed away in 2003.

    * Bill Becher, who coached the Harrisburg City Islanders for an astounding 14 years, which is unheard of in professional soccer at any level these days.

    * Denis Hamlett, the New York Red Bulls sporting director.

    * Mark Pulisic, the father of USMNT standout Christian Pulisic.

    “I was very fortunate when I first came up here to Harrisburg,” Pollihan said. “Some of the players who played with the Hershey Impact — I think we kept about six of them or so — and some the players that I knew when I was down in Baltimore [with the Blast] while coaching in the MISL at the time, I was fortunate to get a lot of those players and then realized afterwards how dedicated they were to the game,” he said. “Not just in the years they were playing. When they were playing in my first two years in Harrisburg, they sorted out a lot of the problems themselves, on the field problems, playing time problems, things that they really delved into it.

    “It was obviously a major help as a first-time coach and a new franchise. It really paid off early for us and helped us to get the core of the team to stay together and helped us with the competitive edge that we had. We were a very good team from the beginning. It’s a complement to those guys and their dedication. a whole bunch of them have continued and have made their living through soccer, coaching colleges, coaching professional teams, running youth organizations. Their commitment has been phenomenal.”

    After leading the Heat to a 24-16 record in his rookie season, Pollihan was voted the 1991-92 NPSL coach of the year.

    The next season the Heat got off to a promising 2-0 start but stumbled in its next eight matches, losing all of them. An abysmal beginning like that might have put the coach on the firing line, but management stayed with Pollihan.

    “One of the cardinal sins of sports is that management loses its patience and gets involved in areas they don’t know or understand much about,” said one front office official at the time. “We decided to work it out with Jim.”

    Pollihan remembered the team management had many meetings during the losing streak. “But they weren’t crisis meetings,” he said in 1992. “There are three schools of thought when a team is losing. You can change the coach; you can change the players, or you can try to find out what the problems are and try to correct them. The easiest thing would have been, ‘He isn’t getting it done. Fire him.’ We tried to talk through it.”

    Adding such franchises as the Wings and Cleveland Crunch, the competition became much more difficult in the NPSL this year.

    “We knew the league was better,” Pollihan said. “We were better. We were playing the same way we played last year. With the new teams there were more forwards who are better finishers. We were losing the ball in crucial areas of the field and our defending zone. Teams were getting 2-on-1’s and 3-on-2s. We were getting beat on our own mistakes.”

    Two memorable weekends

    While not in his formal biography, Pollihan had two other notable achievements as coach. During a three-game road trip in in as many days, the Heat became the first professional indoor team to register three wins on the road. Harrisburg accomplished that with victories at the Canton Invaders, Detroit Rockers and Dayton Dynamo in January 1992.

    “I don’t know if anyone has done that,” Pollihan said. “That was ta hallmark of the NPSL when Steve Paxos was the commissioner. It seemed that every year, you had to have one of those trips. Every team ended up doing it. Everyone wanted to play on weekends, have their home games on weekends because we draw so much better on weekends than you do during the week.”

    In those days, the NPSL played 40-game seasons.

    “The commissioner said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do that. We’re going to allow teams to have Friday night games, Saturday night games, Sunday afternoon or evening games,’ ” Pollihan added. “Very seldom did it happen when you had all three on the road like we did. But when we won all three. Either Monday morning or Tuesday morning when we were back in Harrisburg, commissioner made a call to the Heat office to let us know he was ecstatic and he could tell all these other general managers, coaches and owners, ‘Hey, it’s not that hard to do. A first-year team did it with new players, three games on the road. No complaining when you get three games in three days anymore.’ What we accomplished might not have happened again. I don’t know. It was fun. It was fun on the way home, that’s for sure.”

    In 1993, the Heat defeated both division leaders – the Baltimore Blast, 19-9, on a Friday night and Wichita Wings, 13-0, on a Sunday – at home at the Farm Show Arena on the same weekend. The latter included goalkeeper Joe Mallia’s incredible feat of scoring a goal and recording a shutout in the same game. Goalkeepers have accomplished both, but rarely, if never, in the same contest.

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    Jim Pollihan congratulating his team after a memorable home weekend in 1993. (Michael Lewis/FrontRowSoccer.com)

    “Those were some good times. We had some very exciting games and we pulled out some big, big victories,” Pollihan said.

    In 1999, Pollihan moved into the Heat’s front office as vice president of soccer operations, through January 2003. Former Long Island University standout Richard Chinapoo took over the coaching reins. He was fourth among NPSL coach with 155 wins.

    Pollihan left the Heat in 2003 to take a non-soccer related job. He worked for the state of Pennsylvania in the Department of Revenue and continued to serve soccer as a high school referee and a player in the Old-Timers League.



    If you want to read more about Jim Pollihan, his soccer career, especially with the Rochester Lancers, you can by reading this book:
     
  2. cardshopmd

    cardshopmd Member

    Sep 9, 2008
    Baltimore
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    This is what I was just told. This article went live prior to his passing by mistake. His Passing was confirm This morning. I was told that he had a heart attack playing soccer. After he arrived at an area hospital he was later place on life support.
     
  3. Joey Tee

    Joey Tee Member

    Newcastle United
    United States
    Apr 12, 2010
    Dallas
    Club:
    FC Dallas
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Thanks for posting this Card...
     
    cardshopmd repped this.
  4. btharner

    btharner Member

    Jan 22, 2007
    Selinsgrove, Pa.
    I attended a lot of Heat games during their first few seasons and having Jim Pollihan as our coach was truly a blessing. Lots of wonderful memories. RIP.
     
    cardshopmd repped this.

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