While the Houston Dynamo have been out trying their best to contribute to the soccer legacy in the city, they are certainly not the only ones in the Space City doing so.
Recently, Bill McDonald, who played for the Houston Dynamos in the 1980s, won his 600th game as the head coach of the Strake Jesuit College Prep boys’ soccer team, a role he has held for the past 32 years. In light of this accomplishment, McDonald sat down with Houston Dynamo play-by-play announcer and former Dynamos teammate Glenn Davis on his weekly radio show, Soccer Matters on 97.5. During this interview, McDonald discussed what the reception has been like since securing his 600th win.
“It has been fun to hear and connect with players from the past in the past week or so. That’s been a lot of fun,” McDonald said. “And certainly, achieving something like that is special. But at the same time, I’m a coach and I’m in the middle of the season, so I revert quickly back to the task at hand, which is to try to win the next game.”
McDonald has experienced success at numerous levels of the sport. Prior to joining the Dynamos, he played college soccer at Penn State University, where he helped lead the Nittany Lions to the NCAA national semifinals. According to him, it was the influence of many of the coaches that he had throughout his career that pushed him to go into coaching once his days as a professional came to an end.
“Many years ago, I made a decision to go in this direction and try to make a career out of coaching young kids and I think from the start I wanted to do it because I was pretty fortunate to have good coaches in my life that helped me enjoy playing the game that I loved,” McDonald said. “Years ago, I stepped back and said it’d be good if I could do that for some others.”
This commitment to help young athletes extends beyond the white lines of the soccer pitch. For a time, he served a dual role as both soccer coach and athletic director at Strake Jesuit, a time that he describes as demanding but rewarding.
“It was a challenge to do them both at the same time, but it was a passion,” McDonald said. “It was something I enjoyed. I’ve enjoyed a lot of sports through the course of my life and being Athletic Director at Strake Jesuit was something I took a lot of pride in, in trying to help all of those athletes in all of those sports.”
Of course, McDonald’s main interest lies with soccer. It is why he has devoted his entire life to helping grow the sport. In addition to coaching at Strake, he also spent time as the coach of the Premier Arena Soccer League’s Houston Hotshots.
While this sounds like a lot of work for one person, it is easier when you are as passionate about soccer as McDonald is.
“When you love the game, you’re involved in it in a lot of different aspects,” McDonald said.
McDonald is truly a soccer lifer. And as such, he has seen the game grow in America immensely over the past few decades. While he recognizes that there are a number of factors that are responsible for this rise, he believes that he and his teammates from those old Houston Dynamos days deserve at least some of the credit.
“The game has risen higher and higher and it’s definitely because of the people that were in it 20-30 years ago and kept it going and put it at a place where it could go higher.”
