Story By Eva Dean Folkert and photos by Lynne Powe

During his recent candidacy to become Hope College's ninth and newest men's soccer coach, Dave Brandt opened his coaching prospectus with a story he once read about the late Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Prize winner and U.S. poet laureate. It's not a story one would associate with soccer but, as you'll soon learn, almost everything Dave Brandt reads he relates back to coaching the beautiful game. The story goes like this: 

Poet Brodsky was a visiting faculty member at Columbia University in the 1980s, and according to Carol Muske-Dukes, the author of the story Brandt cites, the old Russian dissenter who learned English in exile would require that his American students memorize and recite poems. Numerous poems, some short, some long. The students balked at first, but Brodsky stood firm. Poems were memorized and, as it turns out, students were transformed. Brodsky had moved words of poetic importance from brains to bloodstreams, observed Muske-Dukes, also a professor at Columbia at the time. "The poems they'd learned," she said, "were now in their blood, beating with their hearts."

When Brandt read that story about Brodsky and those words by Muske-Oates, he knew, just knew that he could apply their profundity to soccer. Brandt couples most things that he reads — and he's a prodigious reader who takes voluminous notes and then files them in manila folders secured in a Rubber-Maid® plastic tub — with his coaching. It's not a gimmicky connectivity nor a one-off either. The effect of words written by great leaders, authors, coaches and even songwriters on Brandt's profession are essential and long-lasting. Because if there is one best way to describe him, it is this:

Dave Brandt is intentional.

Sure, there are other great ways to describe the man whose résumé reads like a Who's Who in American Soccer feature. National Soccer Coaches Association of America Division III Coach of the Year (four times). NCAA Division III National Champion at Messiah College (six times in 12 years). Subject and source for the book, The Messiah Method by Michael Zigarelli, that describes Brandt's seven disciplines that took a soccer program from good to great. Reviver of men's soccer at Division I U.S. Naval Academy. Coach of professional soccer players for the United Soccer League's Pittsburgh Riverhounds.

All of those descriptors are well and very good. But Brandt, more than anything, is a deep and deliberate thinker who fastens his own words, and the words of those who impress and move him, onto his team's culture. One word, one message, one "poem" at a time.

Which brings us back to memorizing verse.

"I have to be careful what I say because if my guys read this, they might think they have a lot of memorization coming," Brandt laughs, "but the reality is I use many prominent quotes as our poems. And yeah, at times, I certainly have players memorize them. Because I think if things are just written down but not spoken about enough — whether they're memorized or not — and are not integrated into what we're doing in any way, then they simply become words on paper and they're irrelevant.

"So, the question is, how do you make this stuff real? How do you make it walk and talk? How do you make it matter? You talk about it a lot and sometimes memorize too. Then it gets into your bloodstream and all of a sudden, before you realize it, it becomes a part of you."

The hopefully-embodied words Brandt carefully culls from the annals of history, industry, sport, and literature, which he then interlaces with his own coaching philosophies, are far-reaching and many. Every "poem" teaches his players that, even though the game they play is fluid and ever-changing, the foundation for the way they play and live should be immovable.

Here, embedded in this story about Brandt's eventual journey to Hope, you'll find just a few of the philosopher-coach's many poems, those words of wisdom that he hopes will soon flow in his Hope team. Many of his sagacious favorites explain his own journey. All explain the life of a man committed to mentoring and molding young men through sport. 

"This cannot be a team of common men because common men go nowhere. You have to be uncommon."

— Herb Brooks

"A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit overcomes habit."

— Erasmus  

Dave Brandt was born in Omaha, Nebraska, but he has lived for most of his life in America's East. He didn't touch a soccer ball until seventh grade, he says, "which would be pretty late by today's norms," because he was too busy playing hockey and baseball. But once he experienced the openness and freedom of playing a dynamic sport on a large swath of green earth, he was immediately captivated. Soccer became his only pastime.

At 14, his family moved to Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, when his father, a physics professor at Gordon College in Massachusetts, became an academic dean at Messiah College. Thus began Brandt's long-time and beloved association with the school where he would eventually find purpose and fame. For 32 years, he stayed associated with Falcon soccer —first as a fan for four years, then as a player for four years, then as an assistant coach for 12 years, then as the head coach for 12 years. It is a perfect story of career ladder ascension in evenly spaced increments.

"I didn't think I was going to get into coaching," reflects Brandt, who was a business administration major at Messiah. "I mean I never knew, but I fell into it when I was asked to be the head jayvee coach at Messiah right after I graduated."

That experience did two things for Brandt: showed him he wanted to stay in coaching and provided him with an opportunity, at a very young adult age, to lead a group of young men, many just a couple years younger than him. All the coaching decisions rested on him, all the interpersonal interactions, too. Brandt's junior varsity role was important to him, he took it seriously, and in just three years his head coach took notice: he was promoted to varsity assistant coach.

In 1997, Brandt got his top-rung call-up to be the head coach at Messiah and within four seasons, the Falcons were national champs for the first time. Five more NCAA gold-and-walnut trophies followed within eight seasons, as did The Messiah Way, the book that explained that Brandt's methodology is as much about concentrating on team chemistry, expectations and culture as it is about game play and strategy.

"What Dave does really well is cast a vision for what a Christian college soccer team should look like," says Brandt's former Messiah assistant coach and now head coach, Brad McCarty. "He cares a lot about being intentional regarding team environment, team culture. He does a really good job of having clear expectations for his players, both on and off field… Some might say the development of the culture and environment is going to be more important than Xs and Os. Dave would argue you don't have to give up one for the other. He cares equally and deeply about both." 

"If you judge success by the fact that we can afford to build this house, it's a dangerous measure. I judge success by how close I am to the melody I hear in my head."

— Bono of the band, U2

"Reputation is the shadow; character is the tree."

— Abraham Lincoln 

By today's athletic definition, success equals winning. Period. And Brandt sure had a lot of defined success at Messiah. 246 wins, 25 losses, 14 ties. In 12 varsity seasons, he became a living Division III soccer coaching legend. By 2008, though, Brandt felt a nudging unrest and asked himself this: Would he always be at Messiah, or should he consider another coaching challenge somewhere else? The world is big, Brandt reasoned, "and my wife Diane and I were just looking for a new and broader experience. "

So he left his only known collegiate home to coach soccer at a place not necessarily renowned for the sport, though it is for educating national leaders. At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Brandt inherited a Division I program whose RPI ranked 195 out of 205 teams when he took over in 2009. Like at Messiah, four years was all he needed to make a difference. By 2013, the Midshipmen's RPI was 21, their record 16-4-2, and with Brandt at the helm, Navy soccer received its first NCAA bid in 24 years and first NCAA win in 41. 

Though the wins were not as copious and the championships farther out of reach at Navy than at Messiah, Brandt's eight seasons with the Midshipmen were a success on many levels, so much so that the Naval Academy awarded him an honorary degree — just the third coach to ever receive one — in May 2016, for "unusual and significant impact on the lives of Midshipmen." "I downplay awards, both for myself and my players, but that honorary degree is by far what I am most proud of in my coaching career," he says.

So what about that definition about winning = success? Brandt gets it, but he doesn't fully buy it. Success's positive outcomes cannot and should not be singularly defined. "The true measure of success ought to be the maximization of human potential," he says. "While that may not be as objective, as black and white, as a win or a loss, I think we all have a sense, and a pretty keen sense, of whether that happens in any given situation, task or season we undertake. Did we maximize our potential as a group or as individuals? That's always the goal."

Then winning, and winning with character and not reputation, is sure to follow.

 "Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier."

— Colin Powell

"The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself entirely to making you happy."

— George Bernard Shaw 

 In 2016, another new challenge called Brandt. The Pittsburgh Riverhounds, a professional soccer team in the United Soccer League, needed a new head coach and Brandt would be the one. Coming on midseason, he guided a team in last place in the standings to a 25-point improvement, finishing 6-17-7. His second season, in 2017, the team went 8-12-12, a 44% improvement. Success was slower but still realized. Brandt brought in numerous top-level NCAA Division I, National Team and MLS players to do so. The climb to the top in Pittsburgh would be long but doable. Brandt was sure of it.

Why, though, did he leave the collegiate soccer world — a world where he was known and established — for the professional one? Short answer: Because of the lure of the pro game. "In this country right now, professional soccer is — by far, by far — at its most exciting time ever. I mean it's not even close to what it was three years ago. It is exploding and becoming more legitimate every second. And I would say that soccer in this country finally, after all these years, has become what I call a culturally cool, and there's no stopping it now. I wanted to be a part of that and it was a really, really neat thing to do."

Yet, for the persistently positive and up-for-the-challenge Brandt, something was missing.

"David pressed. That's what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths."

— Malcolm Gladwell

"Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work."

— Vince Lombardi 

Brandt won't say that he felt a yearning to leave Pittsburgh, but he did feel a void. What he was missing in coaching soccer professionally was something he got in abundance in college sport: the opportunity to have relational influence and educational purpose. He wanted back in, but he was going to be sure it was in the right place. Last fall he turned down a Division I offer; this spring, at the same time that he was candidating at Hope, he pulled out of another. "My wife and I decided it would come down to the type of place we wanted to be in and not necessarily the division," Brandt says.

When the Hope soccer opening reached his radar after Steven Smith's retirement in February, Brandt sent in his application materials immediately, chock-full of his impressive achievements, coaching philosophies, and "poems." Co-Athletic Director Tim Schoonveld knew the largest diamond in the pile when he saw it; Brandt's interview radiated even more. "Dave is a confident individual, but he's also flexible," Schoonveld says. "He knows what he wants and where he's going, but he seems very much a team player. He'll have a great impact on our team and our department."

"The move back (to Division III) for me is really where my heart is," Brandt explains. "As much as it was tremendous to work at that (professional) level, the educational umbrella and the intention to mold and mentor and grow young men, I missed terribly. It's important to me. I believe it is what I have been called and gifted by God to do." And when he added that calling "with the quality of Hope's reputation, academically and athletically, and great Hope people and facilities, and its Christian commitment," he says, "that all brought me here."

His son, Danny, a senior soccer player at Messiah, had a little something to do with it too. "He played on a summer team in Lansing two summers ago and fell in love with Michigan and visited Holland and Grand Rapids and the whole area with his buddies," says Brandt, whose daughter Alex, 27, also played for Messiah and was National Player of the Year in 2013. "He met some people here and said, 'Dad, Holland, Michigan, Hope College — you got to check it out.'"

Along with coaching, Brandt, who holds a master's degree in athletic administration from Temple University, will also teach leadership classes at Hope, just as he did at the Naval Academy. His academic knowledge on the subject has been gleaned from his vast library of leadership books, and his experiential wisdom has been obtained from years leading teams on the pitch.

Now, spring practices are complete. Those practices have been described as so hard, they border on emetic. He makes no apologies for that; it's just the way he and they will work. Brandt and his team start now to tap into their human potential, now to improve upon Hope's fourth-place finish in the MIAA last year. The Davids train now to take down Division III Goliaths.

"What I think Dave does best is translate what he does in practice to show up in a game," describes McCarty. "A lot of times that's harder to do in soccer than other sports that have set plays, like football or basketball where there's more control. In soccer, there are many more variables. It's tougher sometimes to get what you practice to actually show itself in a game. Dave does better than anybody."

All of this is not to say that Brandt has everything about soccer all figured out. If he did, he would have won championships every year, everywhere he went. But that is the beauty of sport. Its variability keeps the competitor hungry and humble all at the same time. With that hunger and humility, Brandt will set soccer players on poetic journeys at Hope — the steps and verses of which are practiced and played between and outside the lines, inevitably instilled in brains, bloodstreams, and hearts.

"Each player learns, somewhere along the way, that as much as it is all about soccer — and it is — it was never really about soccer at all," Brandt concludes. "It was about things bigger, things more important and longer lasting. Soccer was only the vehicle."