MISL Feature
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
By NICHOLAS MURRAY
Even 33 years later, Keith Tozer remembers the moment he found out he’d become a part of the Major Indoor Soccer League.
“I was actually walking up the stairs in our athletic building in Oneonta,” Tozer, then a player at Oneonta State, said. “I remember it as plain as day, one of the secretaries for the athletic director came out and said, ‘Keith, you have a phone call,’ and I’m like, ‘Ok, that’s kind of weird’. So I walk into the athletic director’s office and they hand me the phone and Keith van Eron said to me ‘you’ve been drafted’. He gave me a phone number of who I needed to call and that was it.”
The first selection in MISL’s first draft by the Cincinnati Kids, Tozer admits at the time he didn’t know what the MISL was. But as his career went from Cincinnati to Milwaukee, with stops in cities like Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Los Angeles, Tozer became one of the foremost figures in the league’s history.
Now about to enter his 20th season as the coach of the Wave, Tozer is grateful for the good fortune his career has seen, especially since his move to Milwaukee in 1992.
“To be able to coach this franchise for as long as I have, it’s been 19 years, has been a huge privilege,” Tozer said. “One of the reasons why I came here in 1992 was the history they had already developed after 10 years, it’s been a great franchise off the field and on the field, and it’s been a great honor and a privilege.”
Tozer himself has added to the club’s history. Since he joined the club, the Wave have won the league championship five times, including this past season when they first rallied from a game down in the best-of-three semifinal against the Missouri Comets before beating the Baltimore Blast 16-7 in the championship game this March. Bringing another championship back to the Wave’s fans after falling to Monterrey in the final in the previous season was satisfying to Tozer, who appreciates the support the side has seen from before he became the team’s coach.
“I think Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin, and Wisconsin in general, is a very active and vibrant soccer community,” Tozer said. “With the amount of players and the quality of players we’ve had over the years like the Michael Kings and Victor Noguiras and Greg Howes, I think those kinds of players have attracted other players to this community, so it’s been a community that’s really gotten behind the indoor game a long time ago.”
The club has also seen a remarkable consistency in its ownership in its 28-year history, with only four owners having controlled the club in five different stints. That has helped the club become one of the marquee names in American indoor soccer, with Tozer comparing them to the Blast, New York Arrows and San Diego Sockers.
Now Tozer, who is also the head coach of the U.S. Men’s Futsal, is eager to see what the future holds for the Wave with the MISL’s incorporation into United Soccer Leagues. As someone who has prior relationships with a pair of leading figures in USL in Senior Director of International Development Francisco Marcos and MISL Senior Director Chris Economides, who was the owner of the Kansas City Force when Tozer made his first move into coaching, Tozer is excited for what the future could hold for the league.
“It was a magical moment for me when I stepped into the USL office for that first meeting to see if we were actually going to get together, because at that moment I didn’t feel as if it was them and us, I felt as if it was us,” Tozer said. “It’s great to have Marcie [Laumann] in Virginia and Tommy Tanner, who we battled many years with the Cleveland Force and Crunch, in Syracuse and Bill Andrecki and a Rochester team that’s been great over the years and has a rich history.
“[Add in] the Wichita Wings coming back and the Baltimore Blast … I know with all the people in the front office in USL and all the things that they’re doing, I just see this growing bigger and bigger.”