Buzz Lagos - A Foot in the Door
/
“The House the Buzz Lagos Built” is bigger than a pro soccer stadium that holds 19,400 fans. It’s more crowded, too.
When Minnesota United (MNUFC, the “Loons”) owners and staff christened St. Paul’s Allianz Field in 2019, Manny Lagos, youngest son of St. Paul soccer evangelist, Buzz Lagos, and the team’s Sporting Director, used a black Sharpie marker to pay homage to his dad. The powder-blue girder on which Manny commemorated his dad’s enterprise is massive, yet not big enough to contain the names of all the players, student-athletes, coaches, and soccer fans who have benefitted from Buzz’s fervent embrace of the sport.
Buzz professionalized soccer here, in the modest Midwest, far from the big talent, big money, and big rivalries of European and South American teams. Prescient, Buzz laid ground for big league play, igniting, funding, and/or coaching pro teams from the Minnesota Kicks in 1976, to the Strikers (1984), Thunder (1994), Stars (2010), and onward to MNUFC which began Major League Soccer (MLS) play in 2017. Pro soccer appealed in fits and starts in the early years, maybe too soon for the land of Twins baseball and Vikings football. Yet Buzz could see its draw. Significantly, he saw another opportunity, too: youth soccer. Get kids in the game and soccer will find its footing.
First, Buzz had to learn how to play the game himself. “I was a good athlete,” he says. “I ran, played basketball and baseball in high school, and ‘swamp hockey,’” what kids called outdoor ice hockey in New Jersey, where Buzz grew up. Buzz learned soccer from a fellow graduate student at the University of Minnesota who picked it up in Ghana while in the Peace Corps. “We played on one of the only soccer fields around, at Como and 280,“ Buzz remembers. “I spent a lot of time being not very good at it, but I was fast, so they put me up top.” The players learned as they went along, and improved once a few foreign students join in. “I was a toe kicker,” says Buzz with a sly wink. “I had no idea where the ball would go when I took a shot, but neither did the goalie.”
By the time he was teaching high school math at St Paul Academy (SPA) and a parent of 8 children himself, Buzz was not only coaching soccer, but organizing teams and starting programs all over St. Paul. Always a hub for sports of all kinds, the backyard at Buzz’s house was “not big enough for every kid in St. Paul” to learn soccer, so he got busy creating places they could play. The clubs and locations Buzz enumerates are familiar now to legions of players from St. Paul: “The Blackhawks, the Roadrunners; we pulled kids in from SPA and Cretin in the 70’s and early 80’s,” Buzz lists, rapid fire, “And then the Highland/Groveland Recreation Program. There were no organized sports for girls at all! We started year-round soccer there, and it was all co-rec. The dads lit up, ‘You mean my GIRLS can play?’ The first season? About a hundred kids showed up.”
The challenge was lack of coaches. Buzz had pursued successive coaching licenses from US Soccer – E level to D, then C, B, A - to coach higher levels of play. That licensure and commitment to quality coaching was new to the US, just as soccer was in the 1970’s. “St. Louis had a sophisticated coaching program,” says Buzz. “Minnesota? Not so much.” Buzz journeyed to England after achieving the B and A level professional licenses to audit the English FA Full Badge Course. He wanted “more ideas about how to train athletes, game planning, composure on the sidelines, all of it.”
Buzz then proposed leading an E and D licensing course to amateur coaches in Minnesota. He got St. Paul Academy to host it on their fields. “My coaches had to do everything they wanted the players to do. We didn’t just sit in a classroom, we did the work,” Buzz recalls. “In my own training, I had to demonstrate proficiency in my technical skills: passing, jumping and diving headers, one-touch shots, fakes, cut backs. I had to learn to strike properly, learn full-foot kicking, instep and outside. I had to develop a left foot.”
Buzz estimates he taught 50-60 coaches in that first clinic and he continued teaching it for 15 years, including locations in Richfield and Edina. By then, Buzz knew everybody in soccer in the Twin Cities, and his acolytes went on to coach at various levels throughout the region. “I promised every coach I taught: ‘You’ll be a better coach after this, but still, you might not be a good coach’.” That onus was on them.
Buzz earned success as a high school coach and he led the SPA boys varsity soccer team to 10 straight appearances in the Minnesota State High School League Tournaments of the 1980’s. Two Lagos boys, Gerard and Manny, played on Buzz’s championship high school teams. Was it strange having one’s dad as both math teacher and coach? “Well, it’s all I knew,” says Gerard, who is a parent and St. Paul Blackhawks club coach himself, “Buzz was everywhere, always on the move.”
For a time, Buzz simultaneously coached SPA’s boys varsity and the amateur-turned-pro Minnesota Thunder, for whom sons Gerard and Manny eventually played. Buzz beams as he remembers how many student-athletes of his played for the Thunder: “We played a 6-game exhibition that first season [1990] with these Minnesota guys: Gerard, Manny, Tony Sanneh, Amos Magee. We beat the Winnipeg Fury 2-1! Pros, a bunch of Scottish guys. Gerard scored! We got our first win.”
In 2005, after his Thunder tenure ended (he handed coaching duties to former SPA/Thunder player, Amos Magee), Buzz initiated soccer at Higher Ground Academy, a St. Paul public charter school popular with East African immigrant and refugee students. He noticed, at the beginning, that “the Oromo guys passed to the Oromo guys; the Somali guys passed to the Somali guys,” he says, “It was incredible! They only passed to the guys they knew, the guys they trusted.” Buzz noticed that as skill increased on the pitch, the good players gave and got passes, regardless of language or identity. “Soccer opens up the panoramic view,” he says.
Higher Ground Academy. Photo: MPR
At 76, Buzz is back pacing the sidelines at SPA each fall season, now as assistant boys varsity coach. “I’m ‘almost’ retired,” Buzz announces, “My kids are all grown up. I love to watch the game.” The side yard at the St. Paul home he shares with his wife, Sarah, is still adorned with soccer goals available for pick-up games with neighborhood kids, Buzz’s many grandkids, and college students from nearby Macalester College.
Buzz summarizes his 50+ years of soccer in St. Paul: “I have enjoyed watching all these players grow, these coaches as they became disciples of the game. Coaching is like parenting; it is a long process. You need to know your team. In this sport, there are 11 players to think about; you attack as a group, defend as a group, and individual skill is at work. It’s about preparing a team and letting them play.”
Buzz as Assistant Boys Varsity Coach, St Paul Academy, 2019. Photo: Kurt Waltenbaugh
The hard work and persistence are matched, perhaps, only by Buzz’s humility. His expansive career, he insists, was not a well-laid out plan, offering with a shrug, “I never decided to be a coach, an influencer. There was a need here, and I filled it. We needed a coaching ecosystem, so I started one.”
And the future of St. Paul soccer? “I’m optimistic,” Buzz says. “We have reached a great level of soccer with the Loons in the MLS. I still want more kids to play, to build a better system that is fairer for low-income players. Minnesota has new groups: Somali, Liberian, Karen, Hmong, Oromo players. We want to invite all levels, all skills, and coach them well.”
Higher Ground Academy v. Orono High School. Photo: Star Tribune
Resources:
US Soccer Coaching: https://www.ussoccer.com/coaching
Blackhawks Soccer, St. Paul: https://blackhawksoccer.org/
Higher Ground Academy: https://www.hgacademy.org/
Minnesota United FC: https://www.mnufc.com/
Archived photo of Buzz, Gerard and Manny Lagos (1987) and Buzz, Eric and Olivia Lagos (2019) courtesy of Jane Lagos
Additional pro photos: MNUFC and St. Paul Pioneer Press unless otherwise specified