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| Soccer tradition here spans four decades |
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8/10/2018
By Dan Manley
Advocate Sports Editor
The year was 1978 and the sport of soccer was still, primarily, a South American, European and Mid-Eastern sport.
Just over a decade earlier, soccer was, at times, a laughing point in the United States.
Soccer was beginning to get a little publicity simply because players who kicked “soccer style” were a valuable commodity in the National Football League.
Some of the notoriety had a comedic flare.
The Detroit Lions had one of those “sidewinders” back in 1966 (Pete Gogolak had been the first with the Giants in 1964) named Garo Yepremian.
During one of his early games with the Lions, they were losing but scored a touchdown in the last 10 seconds of the game. Yepremian was sent in to kick the extra point, and he was so excited after converting the point that he went running off the field with his arms raised in celebration.
Teammate and later actor Alex Karras created one of sports best lines ever when he asked Yepremian, “What the hell are you celebrating?”
Yepremian responded with a phrase made famous on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson: “I keek a touchdown”.
A young student teacher from Morehead State University, pony-tail and all, named Jeff Lendon, showed up at Mt. Sterling Elementary. The late Bob Breeding was the principal, a guy who was around when the Mt. Sterling Trojans won a state football championship in 1969.
Bob and Jeff hit it off from the start and that led to the acceptance when Jeff started a soccer “class” for third and fourth graders. Richard Fuller, Monroe Clemons and Ben Lane were some of those young athletes that Jeff started tutoring in the game while he was learning the classroom gig from Sue McGuire whom Lendon simply says “was the best.”
Lendon had grown up about 30 miles outside of Detroit in Utica, Mich.
He was a basketball player who only started playing soccer because they needed a goalie and just being an athlete enabled him to man that post on the soccer field. Jeff ended up at Morehead State University simply because he heard they had a soccer program and it was there that he met Dr. Sabie.
Dr. Mohammed Sabie is often regarded as the “Father of Soccer” in Kentucky.
Sabie began the soccer program at Morehead State in 1964 and led the Eagles to several state championships in an era where the sport was in its formative stages in the United States. He ended up coaching men’s soccer at MSU, first as a club team and later as a varsity sport, for almost three decades and was a professor at MSU for 38 years.
Dr. Sabie died back in 2007.
Sabie also coached for the Iraqi soccer team in the 1968 games in Mexico City. He wrote two textbooks on the sport of soccer and was respected world-wide as an authority on the game.
The bond that formed between Lendon and Dr. Sabie simply took soccer from being an interest to a passion for Lendon.
Breeding obviously saw a lot of promise in Lendon because the year after he did his student teaching he was manning a second grade classroom at Mt. Sterling Elementary. That was 1978 and it was that year that Lendon started a youth soccer program here with over 100 boys and girls from the elementary level involved.
Five years later the Indians were playing at the varsity level and in 1989, the Tribe would be in a state championship match, falling 2-0 to Ballard, on Ballard’s home field.
“That was quite a start, really,” Lendon recalled. “There were really only two county schools, us and Woodford County, playing soccer. So we had to compete in those early years against the Lexington and Louisville schools all the time.”
Montgomery County won six straight region championships from 1985 through 1990.
During that stretch, players that included Monroe Clemons, Richard Fuller, Jessey Bell, Mike Cole, Anthony Chandler and Willie Willoughby.
“Soccer was a great melting pot of the community,” Lendon recalled. “We had players from every part of the community that blended together, learned what it meant to be a team and got the program off to such a great start.
Lendon would stay on the job for 22 seasons until he passed the torch to current MCHS coach Nick Pannell.
That was 2005.
Lendon left with an overall record of 245-210-22. It was a record that could have been much better but Lendon always chose to load up the schedule with the best opponents he could find.
Lendon’s teams won nine regional titles in his 22 years at the helm and during that span the Tribe had their season ended twice in the state semi-finals and twice in the state finals.
“Not winning a state championship is obviously the biggest regret,” Lendon said. “The Ballard game in 1989 was played on a football field and I always felt like on a regular soccer field we might have won. That team had such great speed and could have benefitted from a wider field.”
The 1994 team lost to St. Xavier, 2-0, in the finals and that match was also played on a football field.
When Lendon passed the torch to Pannell in 2005, he was doing so to one of his former players who had spent four years as one of his assistant coaches.
“I felt like Nick had the same passion for the sport that I did and I think that’s proven true with the way he’s continued what we started,” Lendon noted.
It took Pannell five years to win a district title but now they’ve won seven in a row and eight during his 13 years in leading the program.
Pannell has also led the Tribe to three regional titles and two appearances in the Elite Eight.
Long-time boys’ assistant coach Rodney Miles is now head of the girls’ program at MCHS while another long-time assistant, Kevin Miles, is now Pannell’s right-hand man.
Other assistant coaches over the years have included Joe Gomes, Jim Tussey, Tom Pelette, Andrew Cowen, David Griffiths, Kevin Wright, Mike Cole, Ryan Sergant, Adam Jones, Colin Taylor, Tommy Newkirk, Caleb Spencer and Jesus Hernandez.
In the early years of the program Lendon h
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