Hartwick women’s soccer coach Matt Verni kept a video library of every practice from the previous five seasons.

Before Verni became head coach, the Hawks had only one .500-or-better season in the past decade. Then he put together two in the past three years.

“He’s a very organized, prepared person,” Hartwick assistant coach Brian Gordon said. “He knows what he wants his players to do. He’s very honest in his assessment. He’s a thinker. He’s not a guy that flies off the handle.”

That’s why, when then-Syracuse assistant Mike Miller left the Orange for the same position at Duke on June 2, Verni slid to the top of SU men’s head coach Ian McIntyre’s short list of replacement candidates. He was officially hired on June 4.

The two are longtime friends, and their coaching careers have intersected since playing together at Hartwick in 1995 and 1996. But it was Verni’s proven ability as a coach that landed him on the SU staff.

“(Verni) distinguished himself as a top candidate and someone that I felt was not just a quality coach but also a good compliment for Jukka (Masalin) and I,” McIntyre said. “There’s a consistency there.”

Verni said that since he’s been a head coach for the past 10 years, both at Hartwick and for the men’s program at Division II New Haven, he’ll be able to offer more than he did the last time he was a Division I assistant at New Hampshire.

He’s learned about dealing with academics, the team budget and recruiting, and also said that he’s not as mistake-prone as he once was.

Earlier this season he watched his team give away a second-half lead to Nazareth College in the span of just a few minutes. Later in the season, when he saw a two-goal second-half lead sliced to one against St. John Fisher, he switched to a more defensive-minded approach to keep control of the game.

It wasn’t a decision he necessarily wanted to make, but one he felt was necessary.

“You’re going to make mistakes,” Verni said. “The key is you just gain from those experiences of making mistakes or making decisions that don’t go the way that you thought.”

They’re experiences he’ll need as he switches to not only coaching men’s soccer, but its highest collegiate level.

He’s been a part of the men’s game and watched Syracuse, even attending the first-round game of the 2012 NCAA tournament at Cornell.

“The speed and technique of the players is very different,” Verni said. “Not only that it allows for the package to change. There are things that happen in the men’s game that don’t happen in the women’s game.

“Now you’ve got to be a little bit sharper.”

And Verni knows success. He won Hartwick’s last NCAA tournament game in 1995, playing with McIntyre. Since then, McIntyre helped get Verni hired at Hartwick before bringing him on to his own staff.

Verni’s been a learner his whole career and McIntyre called him a “student of the game.” Along the road he’s had to make adjustments. Leaving Hartwick, he said, is one of them and an admitted difficult decision to make.

But he wanted to progress.

“People can develop a comfort zone,” Verni said. “I wasn’t prepared to stay in that comfort zone.”

Published on June 18, 2014 at 2:48 am

Contact Sam: sblum@syr.edu | @SamBlum3