U.S. soccer builder, longtime suburban resident Hank Steinbrecher dies at 77
I first met Hank Steinbrecher years ago in the hall outside the SeatGeek Stadium locker rooms following a Chicago Fire game.
I screwed up the courage to approach the former U.S. Soccer Federation secretary general, introduced myself and told him how I had covered his son Chad when Chad played soccer at Glenbard West many years before that. He let out a big laugh and easily picked up the conversation. A longtime Glen Ellyn resident, he told me to reach out and we’d meet for lunch, and I eagerly took him up on the idea. That started an annual series of lunches that ran until he moved to Arizona because of health problems.
Those health problems finally caught up to him Tuesday morning. Hank Steinbrecher died at age 77. His death was first reported by veteran soccer writer Michael Lewis.
I looked forward to those lunches, urged the calendar to move faster so I could have an excuse to see Steinbrecher again and hear his stories about soccer events and soccer personalities.
He leaves behind an amazing legacy in American soccer. It was under Steinbrecher that the federation found a home in Chicago. Steinbrecher and Alan Rothenberg led the charge for the United States to host the 1994 men’s World Cup, the first time the world’s biggest sporting event hit American shores and which he referred to as a “tipping point” for American soccer. Without that World Cup, there’s no Major League Soccer; the league began in 1996 using the momentum from that World Cup.
“My heart sings when I see what's happening here,” he once said about the growth of American soccer, “just sings.”
He also oversaw staging for soccer at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 1999 Women’s World Cup in the United States. He was inducted into many halls of fame, including the National Soccer Hall of Fame as a builder of the game. A businessman when he wasn’t working in soccer, his LinkedIn page lists him as a College of DuPage Foundation past president.
He was so proud of his family: wife, Ruth Anne; son Corey, a doctor; Chad, a 1999 U.S. Naval Academy graduate and a Navy SEAL. He loved to tell their stories too.
Steinbrecher was intelligent and gregarious but tough, too. To know him was to understand his rise from a small-college soccer coach to the leader of American soccer. But maybe the main reason I looked forward to those lunches so much is that he reminded me in personality, appearance and zest for life of my father, who died years before I met Steinbrecher.
At one of those lunches we ran into one of the moms from my kid’s youth soccer team. She must have overheard a little of our conversation, because on her way out she stopped, put her hand on my shoulder and told him, “Best soccer coach ever.”
The man who hired the legendary Bora Milutinovic to coach the U.S. men’s national team in the first World Cup on American soil, who rubbed elbows with the biggest soccer movers and shakers in the world, who had led American soccer into the 21st century, smiled that broad smile of his and celebrated the moment. And for a few minutes, I was on Cloud 9.
He could celebrate my little moment — and the moments of so many others in the soccer world whose lives he affected and who mourn him today — because he could put it in the perspective of so many of his own much bigger moments.
“I was able to serve the greater cause during my life, which is the cause of developing soccer in America,” he said at a 2010 lunch. “I saw my game at the highest level one can possibly see. I don't know if a life gets better. I just don't know if a life gets better. And every day I get up and I'm enjoying it.
“So I have nothing to be unhappy about, only things to be happy about. … I'm a thoroughly blessed guy. That's why I have the glow on all the time. People say, why are you so happy? Hey, what do I have to be sad about?”
Rest in peace, Hank Steinbrecher. You will be missed, but so much of what you accomplished remains.
Contact Daily Herald Sports Editor Orrin Schwarz at oschwarz@dailyherald.com.