If my math is correct, David Cosgrove has coached Pima College’s men’s soccer program to a 375-120-32 record. That includes the 2018 NJCAA national championship and five berths in the so-called “Final Four."
He also coached the Amphitheater High School boys soccer team to approximately 110 wins from 1992 to 2002, overlapping for five seasons when he coached both the Aztecs and Panthers.
There’s more: Cosgrove played for Pima College’s 1988 soccer team that reached the NJCAA championship game, losing 1-0 in a rainstorm in faraway Trenton, New Jersey. He was a starting soccer player in the mid-1980s at Catalina High School and also played for the UA’s club soccer team in 1991 and 1992 and the semi-pro Tucson Amigos.
Cosgrove even coached FC Tucson in 2018.
He has touched virtually every part of Tucson soccer.
As the director of coaching at what is now called FC Tucson Youth — formerly the Tucson Soccer Academy, of which he was a founder 21 years ago — Cosgrove has surely coached several hundred young soccer teams to victories.
What I’m getting at is this: In almost four decades as a soccer player and coach, Cosgrove has been part of, what, 1,000 winning games? No one will ever get the count exact, but you get the idea. He’s a winner, extraordinaire.
Cosgrove, No. 54 on our list of Tucson’s Top 100 Sports Figures of the last 100 years, probably will never top the November day, 2018, when PCC won the national championship, defeating Barton Community College 2-1 in Daytona Beach, Florida. On that special day, the NCJAA Player of the Year, Pima sophomore Hugo Kametani, scored a title-winning goal for a 2-1 victory.
But perhaps none of it would have been possible had not Cosgrove began his long and successful PCC coaching career with a victory at Yavapai College in September 1998.
At the time, Yavapai was to NJCAA soccer as UCLA basketball was to NCAA hoops under John Wooden. Yavapai had a 90-1-1 home record in the 1990s and was the defending NJCAA champion.
Yet Cosgrove’s first Pima College team won 4-3 in Prescott.
Cosgrove said: “It’s the steppingstone we needed. It’s instant credibility. It’s just mind-boggling what we’ve done."
For the next 20 years, Pima and Yavapai became one of the most intense rivalries in junior college soccer. It was a lot like those old Arizona-UCLA basketball games at McKale Center and Pauley Pavilion.
Finally, in January, Yavapai coach Mike Pantalione retired after 29 seasons and seven national championships. That elevated Cosgrove into a position as the senior statesman of JC soccer in the West, although, at 54, Cosgrove is hardly a “senior."
Cosgrove’s excellence was awarded in 2013 when he was inducted into both the NJCAA Sports Hall of Fame and the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame. Now, the seven-time ACCAC Coach of the Year is the acknowledged pace-setter of ACCAC men’s soccer and one of the leading figures in the history of Tucson soccer.
