Tucson's Father of Soccer is the Star's top sports figure of 2024 | Greg Hansen

A few minutes before noon on Friday, Wolfgang Weber stood on the 40-yard line at Tucson High’s football field. He was surrounded by 25 Salpointe Catholic soccer players.

Weber’s voice carried to the bleachers. It was, in some ways, a free clinic on the art of soccer, a game Weber introduced to an almost soccer-free Tucson sports community 50 years ago.

“Don’t be in a rush,” he told the Lancers in his midst. “Don’t dribble, dribble, dribble and then KICK it,” he continued, his voice rising. “We’ve got plenty of time to get the job done.”

If there is one thing Weber has rarely done is rush it. He is in his 43rd season as Salpointe’s boys soccer coach, the longest-tenured head coach in Tucson prep history, any sport.

Since he arrived in Tucson from his native Germany a half-century ago, Weber has been a chef, a restaurateur, a bookkeeper, a sporting goods dealer and, most famously, the Father of Soccer in our town.

He has survived the death of his wife, Nina, a triple-bypass heart surgery and, much less concerning, 31 seasons in which his Lancers did not win a state championship.

On Friday morning, Weber coached the four-time defending state champion Lancers to a victory over Pueblo, the 774th victory of his Salpointe career. How good is that? No other prep soccer coach in state history has won even 500 games.

Weber continues to be so successful that he is our choice as No. 1 in the Star’s annual Top 100 Tucson Sports Figures of the Year feature, which has run annually since 1996. This is successful: Salpointe has won five of the last six boys state soccer championships by a cumulative score of 18-6.

Last February’s 4-2 victory over Mica Mountain gave him 11 state championships at the school that hired him for $1,500 a year in 1982. He says the years have gone by in a blur.

“You get a sense that the end is coming sometime soon,’’ says Weber. “I’ll turn 78 in February, and we’ll see. God will have something to say about it. Salpointe will have something to say about it. But it’s also my decision and it’s sort of hanging in the air.”

There is no rush for the former teenage soccer standout of Germany’s 1960s FC Koin European soccer power to step aside.

“Wolf’s a legend,” says Tucson attorney Ted Schmidt, who, with Weber, was the co-founder of the highly successful FC Tucson Youth Soccer Club (originally known as the Tucson Soccer Academy) that has served and helped to develop almost 40,000 Pima County soccer players the last 30 years.

“He’s an old school coach who has changed with the times. He’s an example of getting the most out of what you have.”

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If you hope to have Weber rank his best seasons — his state champs Nos. 1 through 11 — try again. It won’t happen. He instead turns the talk to 2003, a year the Lancers opened 24-0 and didn’t win the championship. It was a stretch in which Salpointe had gone eight years without a state championship, a dry period when so many rising soccer powers in the Phoenix area — such as state champs Apollo, Dobson, Ironwood, Brophy Prep, Cactus and Shadow Mountain — appeared to have lapped the Lancers.

“We lost about 10 of our 12 or 13 best kids off that 2003 team,” Weber recalls. “Everybody predicted doom and gloom. But we came back in 2004, went 23-3-1 and won the championship. Normally, I avoid like the plague talking about state championships. That’s not what it’s about.

“We haven’t won the state championship in 31 of my 42 seasons. Yet I remember those 31 seasons just as fondly. I am not all hung up on winning and I impart that to our young men. When I hear a coach say ‘we didn’t play well, but the most important thing is that we won,’ I disagree. The most important thing is that our young men have begun a path of continued growth and improvement in their lives, soccer or no soccer.”

Weber’s place in Tucson sports history is forever secure. His 11 state championships are No. 4 among thousands of high school head coaches in every conceivable sport over the last 100 years.

Sunnyside wrestling coach Bobby DeBerry won 15 state titles with the Blue Devils, 1996-2011; Tucson High track coach Doc Van Horne, won 13 state championships, 1927-53; and Catalina Foothills girls tennis coach Kristie Stevens produced 13 state titles, 2000-19.

“High school soccer in Arizona wouldn’t be where it is without him setting the pace,” says Schmidt. “He established the model for success and people all over the state paid attention to what he was doing in Tucson.”

In Friday’s victory over Pueblo, Weber spent most of the game sitting calmly on the bench next to his eight-year assistant, Louis Gonzalez. Calm works. The Lancers have gone 93-11-1 since 2020, winning all four 4A state championships.

“My style is constantly changing,” Weber says. “If I hadn’t changed with the times and kept educating myself on the game, I would’ve been gone, out of coaching, many years ago. I learn from almost everybody. I’ve learned from Sunnyside coach Casey O’Brien, among many others. He has a wonderful program, one of the best.”

Recently, MaxPreps.com, the leading source of high school athletics in the United States, ranked Salpointe’s boys soccer program at No. 83 overall in the country, all sports. No other Arizona team was ranked in the Top 100.

The credit is to be shared.

“Sometimes people make too much of the coaching part,” says Weber. “I’ve been blessed with terrific kids, a terrific staff, a wonderful athletic department. I can only look back in amazement at all the really wonderful things that have happened in my life.”