The Milwaukee Wave was a couple of weeks from being history. Now, it could very well make some.
The country’s longest continually operating professional soccer club is one win away from claiming its fifth championship trophy. Milwaukee faces La Raza de Monterrey in Sunday’s 5 p.m. MISL title game at the U.S. Cellular Arena, a game that will be televised on Fox Sports Wisconsin.
Wave players and personnel must feel like they’ve crossed a couple oceans while getting to this point. The indoor soccer club was literally days from folding up shop in the summer of 2009, as ownership could no longer handle the monetary burden. Only a quick transfer to a new owner could rescue the storied franchise. D-day was so close that front-office staff were laid off. Public pleas were made to save the Wave.
New owner Jim Lindenberg answered them. Egged on by his teenage son, Lindenberg – despite no prior experience in professional sports – bought the team and resuscitated it. He hired back old staff, kept legendary coach Keith Tozer and brought in some new folks, most notably Peter Wilt as team president.
Wilt, former general manager of Major League Soccer club Chicago Fire, is one of the nation’s top ambassadors for soccer. He’s already helped increase sponsorship revenue, and while attendance remains a battle, the Wave is at least matching previous attendance figures without having to give away loads of free tickets, meaning per-ticket revenue is also rising.
But that’s just the off-field stuff. Once the Wave started playing, the problems certainly didn’t stop.
In its very first preseason practice, the club lost Marcio Leite, the Wave’s best young talent, to a season-ending knee injury. It was a brutal case of déjà vu for Leite, who also missed the previous season with a blown knee. Omens don’t get any worse.
And it was an omen. Health problems and injuries plagued key players throughout the season, the scariest being leading scorer Marco Terminesi’s mysterious bouts with headaches, nausea and vertigo. Doctors believe it’s a brain tumor, and he hasn’t played since January.
So it’s understandable why the Wave was just a .500 team for much of the season. And yet, the club’s one constant is Tozer, and he molded the team into a winner. Buoyed by Goalkeeper of the Year Nick Vorberg, the Wave captured the MISL regular-season title by closing with an eight-game winning streak. This might just be Tozer’s most impressive piece of coaching, and that’s saying a lot.
No American can come close to Tozer’s indoor soccer resume. In 26 seasons, he’s claimed 617 wins, four championships and just picked up his seventh Coach of the Year award. If this were Brazil, where the sport has a following, Tozer would be hailed as the second coming of Vince Lombardi. At the very least, somebody should name a burger after him. Are you listening, A.J. Bombers?
Actually, after all the Wave went through in the past year, I’d guess simply surviving to Sunday is reward enough.
So imagine how sweet winning will be.
No ballgame to watch? No problem. Check out our new TV Guru column to get the lowdown on your remote control options.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter, where I tweet as howiemag. And tune in every Tuesday morning at 6:30 when I join Doug Russell and Mike Wickett on SportsRadio 1250 AM for Tuesdays with Howie. You can also find the segments in their Audio Vault. Or check out my latest appearance on WUWM’s “Lake Effect.”
