Fishbein returns, happier and more at peace
He recently spent 15 months in India
Jeremy Fishbein, a soccer player or coach for almost half a century, has always practiced physical fitness.
Yet, he recently came home to Albuquerque lighter and leaner still after 15 months in India — no longer carrying the excess weight of anger and ego.
In 2018, the University of New Mexico shuttered for budgetary reasons Fishbein’s highly successful men’s soccer program. As hard as he fought to save that program from the administrative ax, he was unable to do so.
Afterward, Fishbein studied for and acquired a Realtor’s license. He served as a volunteer coach for the girls program at Albuquerque High, where his younger daughter, Gabriela, was playing at the time.
Though he kept busy, the hurt and resentment lingered.
“To be honest,” Fishbein said during a recent interview, “I was pretty damn angry and just hadn’t really come out of my shell since 2018 with things.
“I think I was controlled by both ego and anger, and those are pretty worthless emotions in terms of mental and physical wellbeing.”
Then, in the summer of 2021, mutual acquaintances put Fishbein in touch with Seattle software billionaire Girish Mathrubootham. Would Fishbein be interested in helping establish and develop a state-of-the-art soccer program in Mathrubootham’s native Indian city of Chennai?
Yes, he would, yes, he did, and Madras FC was born.
“We finished completion of a truly world-class facility,” Fishbein said. “We had the inauguration up and running, had from an infrastructure standpoint, from a philosophy standpoint, staffing, transition team in place, (ready) to take the next step.
“So I feel that, collectively, we left it set up for incredible success.”
Fishbein himself made enough of an impression, he said, that he
was offered high-ranking positions with other Indian soccer clubs — “President, CEO type stuff,” he said. “Yeah, incredible opportunities.
“But that wasn’t the deal. I’ve got to be with my family, and you realize that (while away).”
Whichever cliché one subscribes to about the meaning of home — there being no place like it, or it being where the heart is — Fishbein, a New Mexican since 2001, is all in.
Life in India, he said, only made his heart grow fonder.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said of his time in India. “It was lonely, it was challenging. You didn’t ever really have a peer group.
“It was just hard being the only international guy.”
At the same time, Fishbein said, his 15 months there were months of learning and healing.
“I wasn’t a tourist,” he said. “I wasn’t visiting. I wasn’t studying. I was working.
“I didn’t study Eastern philosophy,
I lived Eastern philosophy. And that’s kind of required to survive and to have your sanity there, to embrace it. And it took me about, probably, 12 months to appreciate all I’ve learned.”
For Fishbein, coaching had been all-consuming. His job at UNM, year after year, was to put on the field teams that could compete at the highest levels of the college game.
Under his guidance, the Lobos made it to the NCAA title game in 2005 and to the Final Four in 2013. They played in the NCAA Tournament 11 times in his 17 years as head coach.
The project in Chennai, he said, demanded the same laser focus.
Now, he’s ready for something different.
“When I’m coaching a team or running a big organization for somebody else,” he said, “you just get spread thin, and I don’t think I’m at my best. So I’ve made a jump, and I’m gonna start a business.”
Jeremy Fishbein Coaching and Consulting, he said, will of course involve soccer but won’t be limited to that.
“However it develops, it’s kind of sharing a lot of my life and experiences.
“It’s been ups and downs, and I’ve probably learned more from mistakes and failures than successes.”
As committed as he’d been to winning while at UNM, Fishbein never forgot that his job was about relationships as much as or more than about competition. That was the case as well, perhaps more so, in India — respecting different values while sharing and contributing his own.
“Building trust, building relationships,” he said. “It’s the same thing in business. It’s the same thing everywhere.
“It’s about relationships. It’s about empathy. It’s about goalsetting, having a pathway and just that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
He’s come home, he said, buoyed by a unique experience and with a brighter outlook.
Of maintaining that new outlook, he said, “It’s gonna take work. (But) I just know how blessed I am to be back here.”