Remembering Clive Charles, the "Player's Coach" who everybody loved
Born in Dagenham, England, Clive Charles went on to make a name for himself in the US college game. Over two decades on from his death, his players still get emotional talking about his impact...
Say the name Clive Charles to anyone in the UK involved in the women’s game and the responses may be mixed, particularly to modern day followers of the game.
But mention the name of the man born in Dagenham, Essex, in 1951 to almost anyone with any vested interest in the sport in the USA and the response will likely be significant different.
Backwards, perhaps? For a boyhood West Ham United fan who grew up off the back of England winning the 1966 World Cup and played with two of its heroes – captain Bobby Moore and hat-trick hero Geoff Hurst – for the Hammers, before a lack of game time saw him head off to Cardiff City, to be better known in the USA than he is back home.
Charles was the youngest of nine children who grew up playing street football in a working-class family. His brother, John, became the first black player to play for a first division West Ham side and an England youth team, and Clive wasn’t far behind.
To discover why he is remembered as a legend across the pond is to chart the journey the “player’s coach” went on after heading stateside to represent the Portland Timbers in the late 1970s, the place he would call home until his death before time in 2003.
Portland and Clive Charles became intertwined.
After an initial spell playing in Canada, on loan from West Ham, he met his wife Clarena who was a flight attendant on the regular route he took from home in London and back, and the pair settled with their children on the west coast of the USA when Charles joined the Timbers.
In 1982, he started coaching at Reynolds High School in the same state, where he remained until an opportunity came up to coach the men’s team at the University of Portland in 1986, not long after he’d set up his own youth team – F.C. Portland – nearby.
“He just said ‘we’re here for you’, that was the thing which truly set him apart from others…”
Charles remained at the University of Portland until shortly before his death, but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of both what he achieved, and the legacy he has left behind.
The fact the stadium on the site is now named the Clive Charles Soccer Complex offers a first clue, but it was in 1989 when Charles also took on the head coach role of the University’s women’s team that he set off on a journey which would cement the legacy he is remembered for today.
A small programme compared to the giants of the likes of University of North Carolina or Notre Dame, the Portland Pilots, the name given to the soccer team, was a programme which didn’t ordinarily challenge the business end of the NCAA tournaments, until Charles took over that is.
In his 17 years at the helm, Portland won 13 Regional Conference titles, went to 20 NCAA tournaments between men and women combined, making seven appearances in the final four.
On the men’s side, he coached the likes of future USA internationals Steve Cherundolo and Kasey Keller, while on the women’s team players with an even greater international stature, like Tiffeny Milbrett and Shannon Mac Millan, and later future Canada legend Christine Sinclair.
“He was somebody you could go to,” says Bill Irwin, a Northern Irishman who played with Charles in Cardiff, and would become his assistant in Portland for his whole 17-year tenure.
“The door was always open if people had issues, he would talk to them. He would listen and give advice. They knew on the field it was serious, but there were moments during a training session he would make everyone laugh.
“He was a great person to work for and a great person to be around. He knew when to lay down the law and knew when to lighten it up.”
It paints the early brushes on a picture emerging of what exactly made Charles special.
Speak to any number of players and nobody has a bad word to say about him, which is incredibly rare in the world of coaching.
Future USA international Mac Millan – who would go on to amass 170 caps – was one of the earliest to feel the full effect of what Charles could do, and who he was as a person.
The midfielder was recruited in 1992 and would graduate in 1995, a year before her international career took off on the global stage at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but that was a long way from reality when she came to Portland a different person to one who left.
“He was just amazing,” she smiles. “My first interaction with him was actually on my recruitment trip. I was kind of a late bloomer, so I was in my junior year when my club team went all the way to the national championships, and Clive’s assistant at the time saw me and reached out.
“You get promised all this stuff, ‘we’re going to make you a star, get you on the national team, you’ll score all these goals’ and as a 17-year-old you’re just like ‘alright!’ I didn’t even know we had a national team!”
Of all the people who worked with Charles over the years, Mac Millan was one of the ones he had a profound effect on.
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She admits she was not a confident person when she arrived in the northwest, but Charles set her on the path to where she eventually reached and believes she wouldn’t have ever been the player she became without him.
“Clive called me out of the blue,” she recalls. “I thought I was going somewhere else, but he wanted me to come and check out Portland. It was my last trip out of the five you were allowed.
“I sat down in his office and he said, ‘we’ve watched you and think you’d be a good fit’. Portland hadn’t even made the play-offs. I said, ‘am I going to play?’ He just shrugged his shoulders and said ‘I don’t know’. I kind of looked around like is this a joke or something?! But he said I would get an opportunity and he would make sure I got the best opportunity and it was up to me to decide what I did with it.
“Something within me just resonated with that, but I bit my tongue from purely saying ‘I’m in’. I flew home, sat on it, but I felt in my gut it was right because this guy was just amazing.”
After moving her entire life away from where she’d grown up in San Diego, Mac Millan’s life in Portland got off to the worst possible start when she lost her best friends.
“I didn’t know anyone and a week into pre-season my best friend passed away training at her college,” she recalls. “I came home, and I was a hot mess. Before I met Clive, I had no sense of confidence or direction, then to lose my best friend…Clive told me if I never played again he would honour my scholarship, but he said ‘I think getting out there again is the best thing for you’.
“He just said ‘we’re here for you’, that was the thing which truly set him apart from others. He knew how to connect, whether it was the men or the women, he could connect with people individually and as a collective unit. He created an environment of trust. He set us up to succeed.”
It begs the question of how? What was it specifically which set this man apart from everyone else?
It’s a common theme across everybody who was spoken to for this piece. All credit him with the same traits, but to put your finger on what makes all of them at times have to speak through the broken voice or the tears in their eyes is difficult, because such an impact is so rare, especially two decades on.
“When he recruited me, I didn’t look anywhere else, he had so much integrity and such knowledge of the game…”
“His wife Clarena, they grounded each other,” says Mac Millan. “He would have the team over for dinner and we all knew Clarena was the backbone of the family that allowed Clive to be Clive.
“As soon as we got there, he’d run in the kitchen, throw some flour on something and be like ‘Oh I’ve been cooking all day for you guys’ and Clarena would just sit there and roll her eyes!
“They were an amazing team because for Clive coaching both teams took a lot, but he had a solid support system letting him live his dream and she was a mother figure to us all as well.
“He was just genuine and honest. He left Tiffeny Milbrett at the campus because she was late. He just pulled away! What he said he meant, no one was bigger than the team, he instilled that in us. He said all the time he’d rather have 22 hardworking teammates than a couple of stars.”
A year after Mac Millan, another future USA international in Justi Baumgardt was recruited to the programme, and between them and Milbrett the pair helped build the backbone of a team which would go to a first National Championship final in 1995, a moment which put Portland’s programme on the map and opened up the chance for future successes.
Baumgardt was a local, growing up in Renton on the outskirts of Seattle in the same state, but her relationship with Charles went back even further than joining the Pilots.
“I actually met him when I was about 10 years old,” she recalls. “He started the FC Seattle academy; he’d go up on Sundays and train who were considered the top young players.
“Even then, there was just something about him I knew was different and was special. When he recruited me, I didn’t look anywhere else, he had so much integrity and such knowledge of the game. His ability to connect with players…he was a fantastic human being.”
She laughs and says it’s “pretty remarkable” when I again bring up the fact nobody has a bad word to say about Charles, and too offers a glimpse into just why he was so loved by everyone.
“He had a sense of humour but was serious when needed. He had this ability to relate to the players, he knew players so well. Different personalities, right? But he knew how to treat every single individual as humans.”
Baumgardt recalls one of many regular practical jokes he would become famous for among those who played for him.
“In my first year, as an uncomfortable freshman, I remember walking out the first day of training and he asked me if I could hold something for him. I’m like ‘sure!’, and he puts this chewed gum in my hand!
“I’m like ‘Clive, that is disgusting!’ but he was just trying to break the ice. It made me laugh and loosened me up. That’s what he was. On road trips, players would try practical jokes on him, but he’d get them back.”
Another who got an early impression of the personality Charles held within was Michelle French, another who played in the 1995 final but as a freshman, and by 1997 was a MAC Hermann trophy finalist as part of the programme.
“He had an incredible ability to show two different sides in the right moment,” says French. “He could be really serious while sat doing a scouting report, but the very next minute he would be the most funny, incredible prankster, doing some silly gimmick or something!
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“He had such a good balance. From a soccer perspective he was exceptionally detail-orientated, but also very simple at times. He could be intense, but he could be calm, and it was such a gift to be able to recognise when to be a certain way and what the team needs in the moment.
“His ability to feel those moments and bring that emotion out of you was such a special quality about him as a coach.”
It's testament to his impact that even now, decades later, both French and Mac Millan are able to tell the same story completely separately, without prompt, when discussing one of his regular gimmicks he would pull on players who had just joined the programme.
“He had silly games he’d play with the freshmen,” recalls Mac Millan. “He’d offer them a race for 50 bucks. He’s there doing stretches and all of us can see it coming, we’ve all seen it before!
“They take off sprinting and obviously beats him easily and thinking this is the easiest 50 bucks they’ve ever made, and he turns around and says ‘Ah, I never said I’d win, I said I’d race you!’.
“All those little things that he made human, he knew when to be there and when not to be. When to shut it down and when to have the team over for a barbecue.
“It just speaks to the man he was. It was a blessing to play for Portland because he made everybody feel heard. If you needed him, he’d drop whatever he was doing. He was there for advice; he was there for a laugh.”
French adds “He just an uncanny ability in moments. There are so many people who feel they know him who never met him because of stories passed down. He’s such a connecting point, there’s people I meet older than me that say they played with him in England or have been at an event with him.
“Even people who only had five minutes of his time, he left an impression on.”
His whole family became connected with Portland. Daughter Sarah played for the Pilots in the 1990s, while son Michael played golf on the same campus.
Charles himself was more discreet about his role, once saying if he recruited a talented player he couldn’t give them anymore talent, but his job was solely “not to mess them up”, which very often he did a good job of avoiding.
His talent was soon noticed by US Soccer who made him head coach of the women’s U20s team from 1993 to 1995, before he became an assistant for the men’s national team, going to the 1998 World Cup in France and then becoming head coach for the 2000 Olympics team, guiding the USA to an unprecedented semi-final.
Those who know him believe he could have gone on to coach the women’s national team, who had just won the World Cup a year previous in 1999, with Mac Millan a key part of the team, but it’s here the true emotion, and tragedy, of the tale comes to the fore.
In 2000, Charles was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which would eventually take his life.
But Charles didn’t rest, he remained in his role until shortly before he passed away, determined to get the one thing which had eluded him during what became a tenure full of other successes – a National Championship.
It’s further testament to who he was that he continued to coach through the illness and never gave into it until he finally succumbed to his battle three years later.
Wynne McIntosh, who had been part of his side in 1995 which reached the final, returned as his assistant in mid-2002 ahead of a final charge on the championship, with a team spear-headed by Christine Sinclair.
And he got it, with an incredible run to the final which saw the Pilots not concede a single goal, and Sinclair scoring the winner in overtime against Santa Clara to give Charles the title which had evaded him, a mere eight months before he passed away.
It is here the memories become tough to talk about for all who were there and remember.
“Being a part of that season was kind of a dream come true,” recalls McIntosh, as she fights back the tears. “None of us wanted anything more than to get Clive that National Championship. He was very sick at the time.
“He was a second dad for a few of us. My dad passed away the same summer he started coaching me with Justi in the FC Seattle sessions. He made a huge impact on me in the first session, I still remember it. Justi and I played together from age 13, the WUSA days. Mac and I were the forward duo that scored a million goals the year we lost in the final.
“It was heartbreaking to not win that year. We of course all wanted it, but we all adored Sir Charles so much that we felt like we let him down - even though he’d never let on to that and just showed us love and told us he was proud of us after the game. It was honestly one of the hardest days.
“I had a bit of a meltdown in college - I hadn’t properly dealt with my dad’s sudden death at age 46. So, I went to go see A River Runs Through It with a teammate one night in spring. I grew up in Montana before moving to Seattle at age 10. I would fly fish with my dad at our cabin in Montana and it was a magical way to spend a summer. So, the movie struck a nerve. I couldn’t stop crying after watching it and somehow, without real internet or real cell phones, I was able to book a flight to Montana for the next day. I went back home without telling anyone to go process my dad’s death. I went to visit his friends and went to his grave site for the first time, I showed up on my aunt’s doorstep unannounced and she told me stories and shared mementoes with me.
“Anyway, after a few days, Clive called. I sobbed on the phone, but he told me he loved me and that he understood me - which is what sold my mom on my recruiting trip - he understood me and we saw eye to eye better than any coach/mentor/teacher I’d ever had - and that he’d take care of me, but that I needed to come home. I trusted him and he wrapped me in his arms when I arrived back on campus. He was a safe person for me and for many of us. He was truly incredible, and I could not be more grateful for the time I was able to spend with this him.
“His asking me to come coach with him was one of the greatest honours of my life.”
McIntosh recalls several years earlier the moment she realised something wasn’t right, again painting a picture of the connection Charles had with his players, even after they’d left the programme.
With the new Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA) about to start in 2001, both Milbrett and McIntosh were in New York training with new franchise side New York Power, when McIntosh sensed something was untoward with her former coach.
“If I could tell you one regret, it’s I wasn’t part of a team which won him a Championship…”
“We all knew Clive’s home number by heart, but he’d stopped answering the phone or emails, which was totally abnormal for him. I’m close with his family, his daughter was one of my closest friends, and I just had a feeling something was wrong.
“I said to Tiff ‘something’s wrong with Clive, we need to go home’. She’s like ‘what are you talking about?’ I just told her to trust me. I had no right to go, it was my first camp, I was risking everything. Tiff was a founding member of the team and a magical soccer player, but I had to go, and we flew all the way back and found out he had Stage 4 cancer.
“We were heartbroken, but also grateful we got to spend time with him that weekend.”
When Portland reached the final in 2002, Mac Millan and French, as well as Milbrett and no doubt many other former players of his, were there to watch, all hoping and praying he got the send-off he deserved.
“Everyone that had ever played for him wanted that for him,” recalls French, who now holds the role he did as head coach of the Pilots since 2018, just the second head coach since Charles’ death.
“When I was there and we lost the final in ’95, I was more affected because I didn’t win it for him. He brought me in and told me he’d build the programme and I felt like I failed him. To see him finally win it, that was all I ever wanted because he deserved it.”
Mac Millan echoes the sense of guilt, reaffirming the impact he had on those he helped build careers for.
“If I could tell you one regret, it’s I wasn’t part of a team which won him a Championship,” she says, visibly emotional. “They’d never even been a play-off team, and in my junior year we lost in the semi-final and senior year we lost in overtime.
“He’d joke we needed a fifth year together, but I was there in the stands and jumped the fence when he won. Talk about powerful, someone who deserved it all. I just resent I couldn’t win it for him. He was something special.”
“We flew in just for the game. It was like ‘they win, we go down on the field’. And there is Clive, hugging us all! I think for him it was just embracing everything that programme had been, and for him so deserved and so earned…yeah, I don’t know how else to put it.
Baumgardt couldn’t be there after undergoing surgery on an ankle issue but was at home “crying tears of joy” watching the game on TV.
“There had been a lot of successful moments, but that cemented everything he had done. It would have been a tragedy, and that’s a heavy word, if he’d never won a Championship. I don’t think there’s anyone ever more deserving of that happening.”
But he was still Clive Charles, right until the end, as Irwin recalls a story from just 24 hours before the biggest game of his life.
“When we won our first Championship, the day before the game we had a shoe throwing competition,” he laughs. “That was a day before a final. He just told everyone to take their shoes off and see who could throw them the furthest!
“That’s how he was, and he was really ill at the time.”
On his success, Irwin adds “Oh yeah, he deserved all that. We weren’t as funded as other programmes; he started his own club here for players he could take into the college game and quite a few came to us that way.
“Tiff was one of those. He was a visionary in stuff like that. What he saw in the game to develop it here in the States. He was a coach players wanted to play for, he had a magnetic personality.”
It was particularly emotional for McIntosh, who had both played in the final the team lost, and then returned as an assistant just months before finally getting the National Championship seven years later.
“When I came in, we all knew he was quite sick,” she recalls. “There were moments he couldn’t stand up, he couldn’t coach, he couldn’t be at games.
“It was important to everyone to embrace Clive. He never asked that of us, but he had given so much to us…” she pauses as her voice begins to break, before continuing “He was just the most important person to many of us. We’d have taken a bullet if it meant keeping him around.
“It felt like a big weight was lifted. We lost in three final fours, we lost a final, we owed him that and we wanted him to go out on top. Even during that game, he was in a lot of pain, we had to manage that. Sinc came through and scored that goal. It was just a fight and a will; everyone was so determined Clive would win that Championship.”
Charles passed away on 26th August 2003.
His legacy is most felt by the naming of the stadium at the University after him, but it goes much further than that.
As she sits in the same chair in the same office he once occupied, French is best placed to really offer a vision of what he has left behind, just over 20 years after his death.
“When I walk out of my office there’s a picture directly opposite of him with a quote,” as she too has to pause to battle the emotion.
“When you go one hallway down there’s an image of him celebrating the Championship. In our locker room, the wall is wrapped with him holding the trophy and it’s signed by all the alumni who have come back here.
“The people here are still fans of him and fans of the programme because of how Clive made them feel. They all have their stories. When I first got hired, a lot of people shared experiences both of their memories of him and the growth of the programme. We have the Clive Charles award we give out every year, to someone who encapsulates everything Clive was as a human being.
“For me to have him as a coach…now it’s to never let the fire he set here die. Every player who comes through here needs to know who he is. In the stadium, there’s a huge banner with all his accolades, his presence is everywhere.”
Baumgardt has also followed Charles’ route into coaching, taking over as head coach of USL side Midlakes United last year.
Reflecting on where Portland is now as a programme, in being able to attract the likes of Megan Rapinoe over the years, Baumgardt believes Charles “100% put it on the map” when it came to being a major player on the college scene.
“When he recruited me, they were just breaking into the top 20. He told me ‘Come here and I’ll build the programme around you, I promise we’ll be at the top’. He made a promise and kept it because we went into the final four a couple of times.
“You trusted him. He knew a quality player; his talent identification was fantastic. Every time I talk about him, people are like ‘you were at Portland with Clive?’ Everybody knows, that’s a huge thing.
“People say ‘wow, how lucky were you?!’ I’m sure you get this from everybody, but there’s nothing bad to say. He was proud of the programme and I’m sure he had a thousand offers to go somewhere else, but he wanted to build that, and everyone looks back knowing how special that was.
“It’s not a Notre Dame, it’s just a small university on the block, and he created that.”
The further tragedy is how much more Charles had to give.
At 51, there is a belief from everyone he could have managed either the USA men’s or women’s team, or even returned home to coach at the highest level in England.
“He could have coached in England, no problem,” says Irwin. “If he was alive and well, he’d have probably been the men’s national coach in the USA, but definitely the women’s.”
Mac Millan adds “I think he would have loved and would have been phenomenal coaching the USWNT. He was involved in the U20s, and I always wondered what that team would have looked like had he not been taken from us.
“I’ve come across players who played for him for only a handful of minutes and thought he was awesome. The stories you hear, it’s just sad. He definitely had a lot more ahead of him and more lives to touch. I guess it’s that ‘too good to be true’ kind of thing.”
French says “I think people of his era remember him. When we play Santa Clara…Jerry Smith has been there 30 years. Tim Ward at Pepperdine, Anson Dorrance at UNC. Those coaches who coached when Clive was still around. There’s not a day or game we don’t come up against one of them where he doesn’t become the conversation.”
Baumgardt also hits home his legacy. “Among soccer people, for sure. I’ve got a kid on my team; we were just talking yesterday, and he was like ‘how was your time with Clive?’ He’s 18 and knows who he is, they all know, that’s credit to Portland for carrying his name on.”
Some of their final words finish off telling the story of how, in the most heartfelt of ways, a coach from Essex impacted so many lives at the other side of the world, with that impact still felt on them and even their families over 20 years on.
For Mac Millan, being at the final in 2002 was particularly poignant. When she and Milbrett scored the goals which won the USA a first Olympic gold in 1996, Charles had stayed up until 3am to watch the game while on camp with the U20s in Sweden, so she could only repay the favour by being there herself six years later, because it was he who set her on that journey.
When Mac Millan missed out on the initial squad for the Olympics, she told Charles she was considering quitting, but it was he who talked her out of it, and despite only 16 players being selected, Mac Millan went from outside the initial squad the player who scored the gold medal-winning goal.
“Who I was as a player was because of Clive,” she admits. “Everything I achieved on the field was because of that man and what he taught me. Who I am now as a person, as a mum, as a partner is owed to that man.
“I miss him all the time. I have a collage of pictures with him. I have a picture with him stood behind me with his cheesy grin, it’s one of my favourite pictures.”
His legacy with others goes even further, with Baumgardt ensuring the name Clive Charles will continue to run in her own family, again only further showing the impact a mere soccer coach had on so many people.
“I’m getting emotional, I’m happy you’re writing about him,” smiles Baumgardt. “I want his name to continue on because people need to know what a remarkable human he was. My son is a sophomore and he asked, ‘do you think if Clive was still alive I’d be in his type of player?’
“I said ‘Yes, I do’. My eldest son’s middle name is Charles, after Clive. It’s sad for me my kids never got to meet him. They would have absolutely loved him, just to know him and get to know him.
“Whatever he said, you just respected. It was like gold.”
Mac Millan is going a step further; she’s currently working on getting Charles posthumously inducted into the US Soccer Hall of Fame.
“All of us who were a part of Clive have tried in different ways to continue that on,” she admits. “There could only be one Clive Charles, that’s too big a burden to carry for someone, even if we’ve all gone out and tried to do it. It might sound clichéd, but when I’m in a tough situation I ask myself ‘what would Clive have told me?’
“I got him onto the voting ballets to be added. He lost on a tiebreak a few years ago, so that’s an ongoing labour of love, but he was granted an exemption with no hesitation.
“My dream is to call Clarena and say ‘hey, he’s in’.
”