TEXARKANA, TX – In 1994, Sandwich native Steve Golas — then 18 and unknowingly one of the all-time great track & field and soccer stars for the Blue Knights — packed his bags and hit the road for the lush but distant cornfields of Iowa and the campus of Coe College.
It has been 20 long and illustrious years since his feet tore up the East Sandwich soccer fields and the triple jump for Sandwich High School and not once has Golas ever looked back.
Forestdale native Steve Golas coaching this past fall at Texas A&M-Texarkana.
Photo Courtesy of Texas A&M-Texarkana Athletics
Hired nearly two years ago as the first-ever women’s head soccer coach at NAIA Texas A&M-Texarkana, today Golas’ is driving north 889 miles to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, leaving the Lonestar State behind to meet his wife Becky and their two children, Jacoby and Cora (yes, you guessed it, both are named after a Major League Baseball player and yes, Golas confessed, he has been a lifelong Cotuit Kettleers fan).
The Golas family is starting anew once again, this time heading to Becky’s home state of Wisconsin where the soccer-coaching husband-wife team will join Wisconsin-Milwaukee University women’s head soccer coach Tony Fabiano as his assistants.
You see, Fabiano was Becky’s college soccer coach and being a native “Cheesehead,” as Golas sees it, when Fabiano reached out to the pair to see if they’d be interested they just couldn’t fight that maternal tug to return home. While both have enjoyed top collegiate head coaching positions — and helped each other as each other’s assistant coach on their respective teams – Golas said being closer to family and a more familiar environment tugged at their heartstrings.
“That’s exactly what this move is all about. It’s been a whirlwind,” Golas said, after leading the Texas A&M-Texarkana women to an impressive 10-2-3 mark last fall. “I’m leaving an incredible institution and an incredible group of young women.”
Steve Golas
Sandwich High School
Class of 1994
While Golas served as women’s head coach, his wife Becky served as his assistant coach at Texas A&M-Texarkana.
Friday, May 1, was the Golas couple’s last day on the job at Texas A&M-Texarkana, and Sunday night the young Golas patriarch was already driving through the back roads of some Midwest town he could not name as he spent the journey to his family’s new home on an official recruiting trip.
“The service isn’t so good out here,” Golas said, kiddingly.
It’s been a circuitous but meaningful journey for Golas, who at age 14 never even dreamed of becoming a collegiate soccer coach, nevermind in what was then his second sport, or that his life would truly begin in the heart of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“Sort of” recruited for Coe College’s men’s track & field program after he placed 4th in the state in the triple jump in his junior year at Sandwich High School in 1993, Golas was the son of “traditional New Englanders” Mike and Donna Golas of Forestdale. Golas scored high on the SATs and for some reason, one of those standardized auto-generated college marketing letters came to his parents’ home from Coe College and it happened to be around the time the film Field of Dreams had just come out. A lifelong baseball fanatic, Golas says he couldn’t resist the idea of landing somewhere amidst the magical corn rows of the mid-America. The fantasy of seeing Shoeless Joe Jackson’s ghost emerge from the “tall corn,” as it were, seemed to coax him to just go for it.
His brothers were both star athletes at Sandwich High, with Pete a four-year Blue Knights soccer star and Adam setting the school shotput record.
A natural soccer midfielder, Golas played varsity soccer for former Sandwich soccer coach Ted Sadoski for three years (1991-1993) and was an All-Cape & Islands triple jumper for the spring track & field team for all four years at SHS under the tutelage of John Vermynck.
But deciding to head to Coe College, Golas explained, he was fully aware the school was a DIII soccer and track powerhouse. Ultimately, he earned three varsity letters in track for the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee new husband-wife assistant women’s soccer coaches Becky and Steve Golas and their children Jacoby and Cora.
Photo courtesy of the Golas Family
Kohawks and, unexpectedly at first, varsity soccer. As Golas explained, the Coe College soccer coach reached out to him and something clicked.
“I found my life’s passion,” Golas explained. “There wasn’t a whole lot of soccer on TV when I was 14 years old, but I would stay up late and would watch it if I could find it and one player I would see on TV who always stood out for me was a guy named Homer Screws.”
Screws, now a retired American soccer defender who played professionally in the Major Indoor Soccer League, Western Soccer Alliance and American Indoor Soccer Association, eventually landed the job as the Coe College men’s soccer head coach in 1993 when he moved his family to Iowa and caught the school’s attention while coaching youth soccer. Not unlike Golas’s move with wife Becky to Wisconsin, Screws packed up his own family 22 years ago and re-situated them in Cedar Rapids from Tacoma, Washington.
Still the head women’s and men’s soccer coach at Coe College today, Screws was the man who approached Golas as a freshman at the school.
“He’s been a huge influence in my life,” Golas said. “When I got to college, I was a track star who just liked soccer. Homer Screws changed all that for me.”
Golas graduated from Coe College in 1998 after a stellar four-year collegiate soccer career and from there he ventured to Dallas, Texas where his first-ever coaching gig was as an assistant soccer coach at Colleyville Heritage High School in Colleyville, TX. He then applied to Bemidji State (Minnesota) where he was a graduate assistant coach and then became interim head coach for two years.
Bemidji State is where he met the love of his life, Rebecca, a former high school and college soccer star.
Together, the two have spent a decade coaching together wherever their penchant for creating top collegiate soccer teams would take them and that penchant has taken them virtually all over the country, including such schools as Michigan State.
Prior to Texas A&M-Texarkana, Golas spent four seasons as the Head Men’s and Assistant Women’s Soccer Coach at Illinois College. During his tenure, he became the men’s all-time leader in coaching victories, while assisting his wife, Head Women’s Coach, Becky, to the same distinction. His team posted a 10-6-2 record for the 2013 season. Golas also had success with programs at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR and Milikin University in Decatur, IL and as the Head Men’s Coach at William Penn University in Oskaloosa, IA. The well-traveled coach has also coached at Bemidji State University, William Penn University and Angelo State University.
“This (move) allows her (Becky) to be closer to home,” Golas said, but it also allows the happy husband and wife the continued chance to work side-by-side. Being the “head” coach isn’t necessarily the most important thing in their hearts. Being a part of the game they love, together, most assuredly is.
“My journey’s been a crazy one,” Golas said.
Indeed.
— Sean Walsh is the sports editor for www.capecod.com. His email is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @coachwalshccbm
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