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Ingrassia Has a New Project
by Dave Werstine, Long Beach Press-Telegram
January 29, 2007
LONG BEACH - Over the course of Mauricio Ingrassia's coaching career,
just about everything he has touched as turned into gold.
At Los Alamitos High, as an assistant before taking over the program,
he helped guide the Griffins to a CIF championship in 1992.
After leaving the high school game, he transformed Long Beach City College
women's program from nothing into a national powerhouse, winning five
state championships and two national titles in nine years.
And at Long Beach State, where he has called home the past five years,
Ingrassia has again turned around a mediocre-at-best women's program that
is now considered a force in the West Region and is on the edge of becoming
a truly national player.
But for the 49ers to make that next step, Ingrassia has one more Midas
trick to turn.
He was recently installed as the club director for the Long Beach Soccer
Club, a move that he hopes will keep home some of the best talent in the
area, develop it, and use it to make L.B. State a perennial power.
"The key is having a strong club," said Ingrassia. "There's
enough talent here in Long Beach. We just have to keep it ... and develop
it."
That was the reason the now-defunct Beach Soccer Club arose earlier in
the decade and why ex-LBSU coach Julie Cochran got involved.
But things didn't pan out as well as many had hoped, leaving the area's
top talent to continue to flow to stronger soccer clubs in Orange County
among other places.
Currently, Long Beach has three soccer clubs, of which LBSC is the largest.
None of the clubs have a premier-level (best) team, and only LBSC has
a couple of gold (next level down) teams.
Ingrassia, who will take charge of the girls side as well as oversee the
club as a whole, believes that getting involved and bringing in quality
trainers and coaches - like his assistant at LBSU, Sebastian Carrasco,
and UCLA men's assistant Eddie Soto, who will handle the boys side - to
go with some of the club's current staff will help create a top-level
club.
And a building block for the 49er program.
"That's why we developed the Beach club, to be a feeder system,"
said Paul Kaminski, one of the founders of the Beach Soccer Club and who
is now the tournament director for LBSC.
But for an assortment of reasons, things didn't work out. Clubs merged.
Clubs fell apart. And any youth player wanting a strong club foundation
went elsewhere.
"Long Beach has never had a powerful soccer club," Kaminski
said. "It's time Long Beach turned that around. That's why the club
went in this direction. We want to keep Long Beach kids in Long Beach.
We want to go premier or beyond - that's our ultimate goal."
And it's up to Ingrassia, who has recruited top-level players like Hayley
Bolt, Kim Silos, Sahar Haghdan and Lindsay Bullock to LBSU from his ties
as a coach with the Cerritos Infinity club, to lead the way.
"With all the success Mauricio has had and with all he has done,
it was a logical choice," Kaminski said of the decision to hand the
club's direction over to Ingrassia.
The club holds free clinics at LBSU on Friday nights and tryouts for the
upcoming season begin next month.
But Ingrassia acknowledges that LBSC won't turn itself into a serious
player right away, that it is a work in progress.
"It's not going to happen overnight." he said. "It's going
to take a while (to reap the benefits at LBSU), but we have the pieces
in place to make it happen."
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