Seattle's World Cup will play out in Brian Schmetzer's soccer city

Brian Schmetzer watched the soccer ball ping across Lumen Field.

From Federal Way's Hassani Dotson to Seattle's Jackson Ragen. To Seattle University's Alex Roldan and Kirkland's Snyder Brunell. To Mercer Island's Jordan Morris, who lashed in a goal.

The scoring sequence put together by a bunch of Seattle Sounders players with local roots sent Sounders fans into raptures. Then the TV cameras panned to Schmetzer, who simply nodded. As if to say, ahead of the World Cup coming here: Yep, this is how we do it in Seattle."

Schmetzer would know. Because the spectacled Sounders head coach is the king of Seattle soccer, in just about every way you could imagine.

Raised in the Lake City neighborhood, where his parents ran one of Seattle's first soccer stores, Schmetzer conquered the youth soccer scene in the 1970s. He played with the original version of the Sounders in the 1980s. He coached soccer camps and worked construction to get by in the 1990s.

Now Schmetzer leads a Major League Soccer club worth almost $1 billion and has helped build a Sounders roster with a remarkable number of locally sourced standouts, like the crew that helped Morris score against Dallas in April.

Thirteen of 27 players on Schmetzer's squad have Seattle-area ties, including Alex Roldan's brother Cristian, a University of Washington product who will represent the U.S. at the FIFA Men's World Cup, including in Seattle on June 19.

"He's been through a lot of different phases of soccer here," Cristian Roldan said about Schmetzer after a morning practice under gray skies at the Sounders training facility. "When we think of Seattle, we think of Schmetz."

How Schmetzer became soccer royalty is a story that started on patchy fields far from downtown Seattle, accelerated under the lights of the Kingdome, slogged through the collapse of multiple professional leagues, and soared after the Sounders were resurrected.

You can trace Seattle's soccer progress through Schmetzer's career, from the immigrants who cultivated the game to the crowds that cheer on the Sounders and the World Cup teams the city will co-host starting next week.

"It's a great story, honestly," Cristian Roldan said, reflecting on his coach's journey to greatness. "So many people have been impacted by him."

Neighborhood kid

These days, soccer balls kicked across the playfield at John Rogers Elementary School are cradled by a lush expanse of emerald grass.

The terrain was different decades ago, when Schmetzer began playing soccer with his neighborhood friends. Less grass. More bumps. More mud.

"During the summertime, for my parents, the curfew was when the streetlights came on, so we would just come down here and play all day," Schmetzer, now 63, said on a recent visit to his childhood training field. "When the streetlights came on, we had to go home."

For a while, Schmetzer and his pals had other hobbies. They caught crawdads in Thornton Creek, biked in Woodland Park and "got in our fair share of trouble." But in 1970, Schmetzer's father, a soccer-obsessed German immigrant, formed a kids team called the Lake City Hawks to compete in the Seattle area's burgeoning youth soccer scene.

Walter Schmetzer, a machinist who had played at a high level in Germany as a young man, taught the boys how to attack and defend. He drew advanced European tactics on a chalkboard in his basement. He instructed his players to "Slow down" and "Let the ball do the work" by passing to each other, rather than rushing to dribble ahead on their own, said former Hawks midfielder Fred Hamel, now a professor at the University of Puget Sound.

Walter Schmetzer drove Brian a tad harder than the rest, Hamel said.

The Hawks basically never lost.

"We won seven out of 10 state championships" over the next decade, said Brian Schmetzer, whose relationship with soccer changed at that point.

From something fun to play with his friends, "It kind of morphed into something that was more competitive" and serious, he said.

Off the soccer field, Schmetzer's parents kept him grounded. For example, when they collected scrap lumber to build a garage at their home, "I had to take the nails out of the wood, straighten them and put them in a Folgers can" so they could be used again, Schmetzer remembered.

He and his siblings worked as teenagers at Sporthaus Schmetzer, their parents' soccer store on Lake City Way, where generations of recreational players bought their gear. Brian Schmetzer's older sister served customers while he silk-screened jerseys and shirts in a stuffy backroom.

"It was hot in there, and you had to clean stuff with turpentine," said Schmetzer, who also worked as a coach at his dad's soccer camps.

Big breaks

Schmetzer's initial break came in 1980, during a Hawks game in the South End, when he was 17 and still a senior at Nathan Hale High School.

Founded in 1974, the original Seattle Sounders were competing in a glitzy, volatile Major League Soccer predecessor called the North American Soccer League - think big hair, thick mustaches and short shorts.

They had drafted Hamel, who was set to join the club after high school. When Sounders coaches showed up to watch Hamel with the Hawks, they were wowed by Schmetzer, who unleashed an incredible shot from the left wing.

"That thing sailed into the top corner" of the goal and the coaches were so impressed by Schmetzer they decided to sign him, too, he recalled.

"I just happened to be in the right place at the right time," he added. "My mom still has the (newspaper) clipping ... ‘Sounders sign local lads.' "

Schmetzer went pro during the North American Soccer League's heyday, when it was studded with international stars like Germany's Franz Beckenbauer and Brazil's Carlos Alberto. He and Hamel were supporting players.

"We were getting 25,000, 30,000 people in the Kingdome," Schmetzer said. "And then after the NASL folded (a few years later), it became survival."

Schmetzer pivoted to indoor soccer, playing with clubs in Tulsa, Okla., San Diego, Tacoma and St. Louis into the early 1990s. By then, he was a father.

"I had to start thinking about life after soccer, and that's when it got hard," said Schmetzer, who started remodeling and construction companies to supplement income from coaching gigs and soccer clinics.

"I've poured concrete, I've done plumbing. I've done electrical. I've done insulation. I've done drywall. I've done framing. I've done roofing," he said.

But a second break arrived after the Sounders returned as a lower-league team, playing at venues such as Seattle Center's Memorial Stadium. In 2001, the club hired Schmetzer as head coach and his squads excelled, winning titles against foes like the Richmond Kickers and Atlanta Silverbacks.

In 2009, the club joined Major League Soccer with Schmetzer bumped back to assistant coach under the more experienced Sigi Schmid. When the club parted ways with Schmid in 2016, Schmetzer reclaimed the top job.

'Northwest grit'

The Sounders have won nearly 200 games and a haul of trophies since then, usually playing a supercharged form of the collective, possession-based style that the Hawks honed way back when. Yet it was actually a pair of losses during an international competition at Lumen Field last year that demonstrated just how far Schmetzer and Seattle soccer have come.

Experts assumed the Sounders - an American club in a sport traditionally dominated by the rest of the world - would be crushed by Paris Saint-Germain and Atlético Madrid, two European juggernauts. Instead, Seattle's players hung tough and kept the scores relatively close.

"Having him leading us out" for those matches was "particularly surreal," said Paul Rothrock, a Sounders winger who never imagined when growing up on Capitol Hill, and buying cleats from Sporthaus Schmetzer, that he and Schmetzer would one day face off against the likes of PSG and Atlético.

Rothrock is the sort of player Schmetzer believes in, partly because he grinded through lower-league seasons before becoming a Sounders regular. Slight and scrappy, he carries something the coach calls "Northwest grit."

That means, "I'm going to beat you somehow," Schmetzer said. "I might get smacked in the jaw. But you know what? I'm not going to stop."

Not even when Lionel Messi comes to town, like when the Argentine legend and Inter Miami played the Sounders at Lumen Field last summer.

"Messi is arguably the best player the world has ever seen, but we've got Paul Rothrock," among others, Schmetzer told reporters before the match.

The quote went viral, because comparing an unheralded underdog like Rothrock to a soccer god like Messi seemed almost ludicrous at the time. Then the Sounders slayed Miami with a clinching third goal from … Rothrock.

The moment showed Schmetzer molding the Sounders in his own image. He later said his quote was inspired by a pep talk from his wife, Kristine.

Rothrock says about Schmetzer: "His story resonates with my story, too. Being a Seattle kid. He was one of the first guys to do it."

World Cup

During Sounders games, Schmetzer prowls the sideline in his customary suit, tie and dress shoes, jotting notes to himself on scraps of paper.

He sometimes gets snippy with members of the soccer media. Schmetzer recently apologized to journalist Niko Moreno after dissing him on a local radio show for asking a news conference question he didn't like, Moreno said.

"There are times he won't take criticism lightly," partly because he's had so much success and proved so many doubters wrong along the way, Moreno said, commending Schmetzer for being willing to patch things up. "He does show that human side with the media, for better or worse."

Schmetzer's players say he has hard and soft attributes, pushing them to perform while showing real care for them and their families.

He loves the book "The Boys in the Boat, about University of Washington rowers who struggled through the Great Depression to capture gold medals at the Olympic Games. They had Northwest grit in spades, Schmetzer said.

The traits Schmetzer admires aren't exclusive to players from here, however.

He sees them in Sounders like Nouhou Tolo, an emotive defender from Cameroon who jokingly calls Schmetzer "father" and never backs down against opposing attackers. He sees them in Los Angeles-raised Cristian Roldan. Roldan runs his legs off to win and deserves his spot on the U.S. squad this summer, said Schmetzer, who's looking forward to the World Cup.

The Sounders won't play games during the tournament, so Schmetzer may have some extra down time. He likes taking walks in his Madison Park neighborhood and watching Scandinavian detective shows with Kristine, doting on his grandkids and using a deluxe barbecue he built himself.

Still, Schmetzer will make sure to enjoy Seattle's World Cup moment, he said, hoping the huge soccer party briefly eases global political tensions.

"Our world is so complicated," Schmetzer said, gazing across the field where he learned to play. "What I wish for is for that just to subside a little bit."

To slow down. And as his dad used to say, let the ball do the work.

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