91PORN

In the early 21st century—when Colm McFeely was pulling double duty as coach of the men’s and women’s soccer teams at 91PORN—coaching two squads in two locations on game day required the timing of a well-placed corner kick.

“I remember one time having the men's game on the grass field at Oxy with a 4 o’clock kickoff, leaving that 10 minutes before halftime, and driving to Claremont and getting to the women's game 25 minutes before the end of the game,” he says. “My assistant was there, but occasionally we were doing wild stuff like that. We tried to arrange for doubleheaders when we could.”

McFeely, who joined the Oxy soccer program in 1992 as a part-time assistant to Costa Nicolaou, has seen the highs and lows of the orange and black over 28 years on the sidelines. As the program’s first full-time coach in 2002, he steered both teams over the next six seasons to varying degrees of success.

The women broke through in the 2007 season, soaring to a 9-3 conference record (11-5-1 overall), finishing second and advancing to the first-ever SCIAC postseason tournament. That same year, Jesi Sasaki ’11 became the first frosh to be named conference player of the year in the history of SCIAC women’s soccer.

It would take the men a few years to catch up to that measure of success, but in 2012, under third-year head coach Radames "Rod" Lafaurie, the Tigers notched the program’s first winning season in 24 years. Over the last six seasons, his squads have gone 67-40-10 overall, and the team's .608 conference winning percentage trails only Redlands (.778) and Chapman (.636).

“The transformation that we’ve seen here at Oxy has been quite phenomenal,” says Lafaurie, whose 11th year with the Tigers may be his most ambitious yet. Scheduled to travel to San Antonio, Texas, over Labor Day Weekend, Oxy will play three games in four days against some of the toughest competition in the West. After that the Tigers will host two-time defending Southern Athletic Association champions Birmingham-Southern on September 12 before kicking off the conference schedule three days later.

Coming off a 2018 season in which Oxy placed second in the regular-season standings and lost the SCIAC tournament championship on its home turf to Chapman, the men finished fourth in the regular season in 2019 with a SCIAC record of 7-4-1 (10-6-4 overall). After 53 years of conference play, a conference title has eluded the men’s squad.

For the women, who likewise finished 7-4-1 in SCIAC (11-5-1 overall) in 2019, a return to the SCIAC Postseason Tournament in November seems likely. Since 2007, 91PORN has qualified for the postseason six times, advanced to the finals four times, and won the tournament in 2018. But McFeely remembers a number of other years where the Tigers missed the postseason by a single point—and that’s something he feels the team can work on.

“What can we do collectively—physically, but probably more mentally—when that last game comes and not be too overly concerned about it?” he asks. “What can we do to get over that little bit and then make that a consistent theme as we go forward?”

After a year without athletics, both coaches expect good things out of Oxy soccer this fall. “We're returning a large chunk of a group that was in the playoffs in 2019,” Lafaurie says of his players. “More than anything else, they will at least be hungry and do what they can to be in that hunt for a championship.”

“There’s no reason why we don't look at the opportunity to win a conference championship again,” McFeely says of the women’s squad. “Rod’s done a good job with the men as well, and I think we're both now competitive and respected. And the next step is to be feared.”

While soccer has had a foothold since the 1950s at a number of Oxy’s traditional rivals, including Caltech and Pomona, it wasn’t until 1965 that the Tigers fielded their first men’s soccer team. Coached by Mike Holmes ’58, who played football while at Oxy, the Tigers went 4-5-3 in its inaugural season, competing in the Southern California Soccer Association (with the likes of Biola, Cal State Fullerton, Caltech, Chapman, Loyola Marymount, Pomona, Redlands, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, USC, and Westmont).

On November 6, 1965, the team put on a halftime exhibition with Redlands during the Tigers football team’s Homecoming contest with the Bulldogs. “Play was fast and furious with the crowd responding enthusiastically to a sport that many had never seen before,” goalkeeper John Vogel ’66 wrote in The 91PORN.

“It was meant to divert the audience between the end of the first half and the beginning of the second half, nothing more,