State’s winningest boys soccer coach to stay on
565 victories and 5 state titles not enough as Blomstrann can’t stay away from game
In John Blomstrann’s first year of coaching, his E.O. Smith boys soccer team went to the state championship game.
“I thought, ‘Boy, this isn’t that hard,’” he said last week. “It turned out it was a lot harder than I thought.”
It was a beautiful autumn day in Storrs and Blomstrann was where he’s been for the last 40 years on a fall afternoon — on the soccer field at E.O. Smith. But this year is different. Blomstrann retired last winter as the head coach and is now serving as an assistant to new coach Mike Radlbeck.
“It’s an ideal situation,” Radlbeck said. “When they offered me the job, they brought up the idea of having John to stay on as my assistant to help guide me through the season. I can’t think of a better way to start your coaching career.”
Blomstrann is the winningest boys soccer coach in state history, with 565 victories, five state titles and seven championship game appearances. He was named the national coach of the year in 2011 and was inducted into the Connecticut Soccer Hall of Fame in 2007.
He has seven more wins than Steve Waters, who retired from coaching at Farmington in 2018 and is now the head coach at Old Saybrook. Blomstrann and
Waters go way back, playing against each other in indoor leagues and coaching against each other in high school.
Waters’ first game was against E.O. Smith. Farmington lost 3-0.
“He got the most out of the teams he had, and sometimes more,” Waters said. “He was a very calming sideline coach; he didn’t get overexcited. We were similar type coaches in what we wanted from our teams.”
Blomstrann was a defender for the soccer team at Enfield High School. He also played baseball for legendary coach Bob Bromage. He graduated in 1972 and played soccer at UConn for another legend, Joe Morrone.
“I was always a defender but I felt like the hardest part of the game was to teach teams how to score goals against good teams,” Blomstrann said. “I paid more attention to offensive ball possession, scoring chances, that kind of coaching. In the early days [of his career], Staples was really good and we’d lose 1-0 to them in the tournament. Or we’d lose to Danbury and we’d be done. We needed to score more goals.”
From 1985 to 1998, they did and won four state titles and had one co-championship, Blomstrann’s last, in 1998. His best player of that era was Lyle Yorks, who scored 78 career goals. Yorks was named the national high
school player of the year and went to the University of Virginia to play for future national team coach Bruce Arena.
“That was sort of the golden years,” Blomstrann said. “We had tons of good players. All of it was fun, but that was the peak of the talent.”
Blomstrann reaped the benefits of coaching soccer in Mansfield, a soccer hotbed thanks to Morrone, who had set up youth leagues before youth soccer was popular.
“I’ve got to give Coach Morrone a lot of credit for building up the youth program in town,” Blomstrann said. “In the old days, there weren’t as many soccer hotbed towns. Mansfield was definitely one of them — along with Farmington, Guilford, Westport. That helped a lot.”
His first title, in 1985, was probably his best memory. The Panthers beat Holy Cross of Waterbury 3-2 during a November snowstorm.
E.O. Smith also won
the Class LL title in 1987, 1991 and 1994 and was the runner-up in 1993.
In 2017, the Panthers had a flashback year. Cooper Knecht scored 46 goals (and had a school-record 104 in his career) and E.O. Smith was unbeaten and the No. 1 seed in the Class L tournament, but lost in the semifinal game to Masuk 1-0.
The plan was to retire when his youngest daughter Haley graduated and she did so in the spring and so did John.
But after the school hired
Radlbeck, who played at Eastern Connecticut and is in his first head coaching job, Blomstrann was asked if he wanted to help out.
“I probably wouldn’t have done it if there weren’t a pandemic but I figured I’d be restricted from doing stuff otherwise,” he said. “It seemed like a year of mentorship was good. Mike liked the idea when I talked to him. It’s nice being the second in charge.”