BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – When former Texas A&M soccer coach G Guerrieri’s daughter Emily was in high school, she spent plenty of time hanging out with the daughters of former football coach Kevin Sumlin and baseball coach Rob Childress.
During those conversations, the girls were amazed that the soccer coaches’ daughter had spent her entire childhood in College Station. As the children of college coaches, the other two girls had hopped from location to location, following their father’s work.
Guerrieri still remembers his daughter’s confusion with the subject. She asked him if it was strange to have lived in one town her whole life.
“We’ve been blessed,” Guerrieri told her. “Especially to be in this community that’s so warm and engaging.”
The reality was that Guerrieri accomplished the near impossible in college sports. Last week, the 62-year-old coach announced his retirement after 33 years of coaching, all with the Aggies. He is the only coach the program has ever known.
“For me, it’s always been about, do you really want to just take the short-term, feel-good moments or do you want to do something that is going to be lasting and everlasting?” Guerreri told KBTX. “It’s one of the reasons we’ve stayed here so long. Had many, many opportunities to leave, but Texas A&M is a destination.”
Wednesday, Guerrieri strode into the KBTX studios to look back on his career with the Aggies and discuss what comes next. From all those years of Brazos Valley experience, he remembered the two previous locations of the studio’s weather desk and where former sports director Darryl Bruffett opened his sports casts with a, “Howdy, Brazos Valley.”
In fact, one of his earliest memories was an interview with Bruffett, shortly after he was hired as a 30-year-old for the then-upstart program.
“Out at what’s now Bachmann Park in the pavilion was my first introduction to the community that night,” Guerrieri said. “I said, ‘We plan to dominate Texas and my goal is to recruit and bring in at least two of the top five recruits in Texas every year.’ Well, when I said we’re going to dominate Texas, there was all these, ‘Whoops’ in the back. They’re thinking about the school in Austin, which we did dominate.”
As a part of a career that finished as the fifth-winningest coach Division I women’s soccer history, Guerrieri’s Aggies did dominate their biggest rival with an all-time series record of 22-7-2. The Aggies hold an 11-1 record against the Longhorns in Ellis Field, including a 1-0 victory this season.
When A&M initially posted the head coaching job in the early 1990s, Guerrieri, a Tulsa alumnus, thought he might have an in because he was preparing to marry his wife, Terri, a 1987 A&M graduate. He still remembers staying at the old Holiday Inn on Texas Avenue for his interview.
“As I was going through that interview process on the last day of March in 1993, just how — ‘Wow, there’s so much potential here. This is something we could really make a lot of fun and we could, I think, have a lot of success.’”
Over the next 33 years, A&M claimed 18 conference championships, 10 regular-season conference titles and 28 NCAA Tournament appearances. Beyond the 16 Sweet 16 appearances and seven trips to the Elite Eight, the Aggies punched their ticket to the NCAA Women’s College Cup in 2014.
The happiness extended beyond the soccer pitch. The Guerrieris raised three children in the Brazos Valley, all of whom attended A&M. His oldest son, Alan, was a punter on the Aggie football team and his youngest, Conner, is a junior at A&M and a member of the male practice squad for the soccer program. Guerrieri has also been instrumental in forming the Cavalry Youth Soccer program for young athletes in the Brazos Valley. On Dec. 8, he will hold his annual golf tournament at Traditions, which supports these athletes.
In the meantime, Guerrieri will continue his work as the head of the Intercollegiate Women’s Soccer Organization for Coaches, advocating for women’s soccer and its coaching staffs. He hopes women’s soccer can be a revenue-generating sport across the country in an era of revenue sharing with college athletes.
He will also continue serving on the NCAA oversight committee for women’s soccer, on which he’ll sit through 2029. The sport is experiencing pressure from the U.S. Soccer Federation to change its format, making college soccer another legitimate route to the professional ranks. However, most of these suggestions, which include regionalizing conferences and creating a promotion and relegation system, have had significant push-back from the women’s game, which does funnel athletes into professional soccer.
“If that’s what the men want, then we support the men in wanting that. But, we can tell you, enthusiastically, that’s not what the women want. The women love being a part of what the fall on our campuses are and we want to just try to make that better. We want to make our championship a bigger event. We want to do more, try to get more television in those weeks of our season, prior to the start of college football, because right now, there’s not that much competition.”
With more time on his hands, colleagues have told Guerrieri, “If not you, then who?” when it comes to advocating for the women’s game, he said. The extra time will give him a little more teeth when it comes to these conversations.
With an A&M contract that runs through March of next year, he will also spend time fundraising for an Aggie soccer program that is in need of money, he said. The hope is to leave the program in a better financial situation than it has been over the last several years.
Part of that is renovating Ellis Field, a metal-clad relic of an A&M athletic department of the past. The soccer pitch is surrounded by new, brick facilities for softball, track and a soon-to-be renovated baseball stadium. Under some of the athletic directors before the current Trev Alberts, soccer got low billing in the budget, he said.
“We kept winning and kept winning, but since the NIL period has come around, since a lot of these things have come around, the programs that get fed are the programs that are going to flourish,” he said. “You look at football right now, I mean, those kids are being well fed and they’re flourishing, because of the right leadership with Mike Elko and his group. If you don’t put the right gas in the engine, it’s not going to run.”
Sitting on the couch in the KBTX studio, Guerrieri pointed to the recently-repaired Apple watch on his left wrist. He had just gotten it back from repairs he jokingly claimed were needed due to all of the kind words and well-wishes he received after announcing his retirement.
Notably, he received calls from former A&M head coaches Gary Blair, Rob Childress, Laurie Corbelli and R.C. Slocum. Coaches who hitched their wagon to A&M and have remained ingrained in the fabric of Aggie athletics because of it. After a three-decade career with the A&M soccer team, Guerrieri’s name can be inked into that list.
“I wake up and I go to recess every day and that’s really the way it’s been,” he said. “It’s been the ability to recruit great people here, to see them matriculate through, to see them go off and do great things in the world — whether it’s as athletes, but also as mothers and business leaders and everything else. It’s been pretty cool.”
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